


Unexpected Effects

by AxeMeAboutAxinomancy



Series: Flowers [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Experimentation, First Time, M/M, Podfic Available, Post Reichenbach, Telepathic Sex, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2012-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-22 00:04:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 49,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/603554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AxeMeAboutAxinomancy/pseuds/AxeMeAboutAxinomancy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After his return, Sherlock begins an experiment involving orchids. His objective: to make his mind work better - but he begins 'hearing' unexpected things. John is torn between his anger at Sherlock and his secret feelings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Gorgeous [art](http://31.media.tumblr.com/8236fc6f5e92c7e5500b8ec64122d589/tumblr_mrwz1fur361qbvoaho1_500.png) of Sherlock with orchid and belladonna by [thelilnan](http://thelilnan.tumblr.com/). And two beautiful gift covers! [This one](http://archiveofourown.org/works/946544) by [fiorinda_chancellor](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fiorinda_chancellor/pseuds/fiorinda_chancellor), and [this one](http://archiveofourown.org/works/974409) by [consultingpiskies](http://archiveofourown.org/users/consultingpiskies/pseuds/consultingpiskies)!

Six months or so after his return from supposed death and disgrace, Sherlock Holmes began to take a particular interest in orchids.  
  
 _Psychilis cogniauxii_ , read the invoice from South America, and then some other things John Watson didn't understand, but he comprehended the total at the bottom of it perfectly well and it was a hell of a lot.  
  
The flowers were pretty enough, if you cared about flowers, but they smelled like new shoes.  
  
He did not ask what they were for. John had already long since learned to stop questioning these kinds of things (heads, limbs, scorpions in the fridge, horrible horrible things in the microwave) in the time Before, as the answers were never as illuminating as they were disturbing; but in the time Since, he was even less inclined to complain, even when he wanted to. John would have thought he'd get used to the smell of the orchids, or that the smell would fade, but neither of these things seemed in any hurry to happen.  
  
It wasn't that he felt he had no _right_ to complain. Neither was it a fear of pushing Sherlock away... exactly. It was more a fear of letting out the anger inside him, because expressing it would give him no relief and solve nothing. There was too much of it and only one thing he could say, over and over, and once would be too much.  
  
Sherlock had a new microscope now, and he spent quite a lot of time fiddling with extracts and gazing into the eyepiece. He never made notes. John wondered if such things went into the Mind Palace or if there might be some other structure for chemistry and experiments. A sort of Mind University with its various Mind Colleges. And anything he didn't want to remember got chucked in the Mind Bin.  
  
Since Sherlock came back, John's orbit around him would swing sometimes close and sometimes distant. He stayed around the flat for days, then he went wandering around the city, and perhaps while he was gone Sherlock would say things or ask things and John did not happen to be there. John knew the feeling, but Sherlock did not know the feeling of remembering, over and over, that the person you were carelessly talking to was not just absent but dead. Absent forever. Sherlock didn't have any idea what that was like.  
  
It would have been a day to go wandering, to get away, but John never got the chance. That was the day the stalker started posting comments on John's blog... and then Sherlock's blog... and later, some other places. And the free floating cloud of darkness that had been hanging around John blew clear immediately at the suggestion of threat. Towards Sherlock.  
  
On John's blog, an anonymous commenter wrote: Did you pick up all his pieces?  
  
John stared at these words, and the more he stared at them the less he liked the look of them.  
  
There had been plenty of awful things on his and Sherlock's blogs - After. He'd just turned comments off on his last entry, but he hadn't had the password for Sherlock's. And right after Sherlock came back, and it was in the news, one or two crazies had got into it for a while, one attacking what Sherlock had done, one defending him tooth and nail, and it was impossible to say which of them was worse. Someone was always wrong on the internet, and someone else was always eager and ready to point it out. But it had all died down after a couple of months.  
  
 _This_ comment had been posted the night before. The entry to which it was attached was about the last case, the second one they'd done Since, and it was weeks old now. The 'his' could only mean Sherlock, and as for pieces... John checked the IP address. It was not the same as that of either of the loonies from back then.  
  
But it wasn't so awful a comment, really - it was just disturbing. Mildly disturbing. Pretty tame for the internet, all things considered.  
  
He would have to keep an eye on it.  
  
***  
It was a mistake that led him here, but Sherlock is on to something new.  
  
A misunderstanding (that is to say stupidity) at the horticultural supply had sent him belladonna lilies instead of _atropa belladonna_ , and this had led him to the thought of orchids. Thousands and thousands of species. Narrowed down to hundreds, dozens, one. _Psychilis cogniauxii,_ very promising.  
  
He licks his lips. He wants a cigarette very badly. He glances up: John is frowning at his computer, completely diverted. Without a word Sherlock gets up and slips downstairs.  
  
Mrs Hudson is in a smoking phase herself and is not only sympathetic but positively enabling. She makes the usual _I-won't-tell_ gesture, finger to her lips, but Sherlock shrugs as he draws deep on his cigarette. John used to watch him like a mother hawk for signs that he was smoking, but it seems that he doesn't care anymore.  
  
Still, Sherlock doesn't try to test this by actually smoking in front of John, or in their flat. It couldn't be good for the orchids, anyway.  
  
"How is it with your flowers, dear. Interesting?"  
  
She's not asking about that, she doesn't care about that at all. She's amused by the flowers, actually, but much happier in general with botanical experiments than those on human parts. "Mm," noncommittal noise. Sherlock doesn't particularly want follow-up questions on the subject of the flowers, and anyway she is about to say something about John.  
  
Mrs Hudson taps her cigarette at the side of the chunky glass ashtray. It was a wedding present from when she married her first husband. "Sherlock dear, don't take this wrong, but I need to ask you about something."  
  
He waits, smoking. She knows him better than to expect him to prompt her. All the while he is more than half listening for sounds from upstairs, any hint of John moving around. None yet. He hasn't even noticed Sherlock is gone.  
  
What a strange feeling.  
  
Mrs Hudson says carefully, "Since... since you came back... Have you two been getting along?"  
  
"Of course." Why is she asking this? They haven't been getting into arguments or causing any destruction. Hardly any destruction. None really worth mentioning.  
  
"Well. I worry about you. When you were gone, he - "  
  
Floorboards creak upstairs. Sherlock crushes out his cigarette and smoothly stands up. "Everything's fine," he assures her, bending to kiss her cheek. "May I take this," taking up, at random, a tin of biscuits. "John wants some," lying.  
  
"Oh, go on then," and her sigh is a plume of smoke that zigzags as she shakes her head at him.  
  
Sherlock mounts the stairs two at a time till he reaches the odd one and bursts back into B, brandishing biscuits. John looks at him from the kitchen, eyebrows inquiring. Sherlock holds up his prize.  
  
"Kettle on?"  
  
The orchids are, admittedly, in the way. He needs them alive when he harvests and processes them, so there it is. John has complained more than once that they smell funny, but Sherlock thinks they at least smell original, not like other flowers' sweet cliches... the banality of jasmine, the utter tedium of roses.  
  
Besides, they're pretty enough. And much safer to leave around than the belladonna. Not because of any risk of accidental poisoning - because of John and what he might think it was for. He has become... twitchy on some topics. It isn't that he's lost his taste for danger altogether, but in the time since Sherlock has come back, John has reacted badly more than once to perfectly ordinary situations, hardly dangerous at all. And he _hates_ seeing Sherlock in high places. It gives him the kind of dreams he used to have about the war. Sherlock had assumed they _were_ dreams about the war, until he heard John calling out his name.  
  
Which doesn't make any sense at all. John understands why Sherlock did what he did, Sherlock explained it, John said he understood, he _understands_. He understands every part of it. Why Sherlock had to do it. Why he stayed away. Why Molly could know the truth, why Mycroft could know the truth, but not John. To _save his life_. So why it is still a _problem_ is not something Sherlock has patience with. He shook off that psychosomatic limp by the second day. Why can't he shake _this_ off? Why can't everything just go back to the way it was before?  
  
Sherlock is still standing there in the living room, lost in thought, when John brings in mugs of tea, sets them down, and gently takes the biscuit tin out of his hands. John turns away, pulling the lid off the tin, then pauses and turns back, sniffing suspiciously at Sherlock.  
  
"Jesus. Are you _smoking_ again?"  
  
Sherlock blinks at John's suspicious frowning face, the bulldog stance, the suggestion from his posture that he'd like to throw the biscuit tin at Sherlock's head, and he smiles at John.  
  
***  
"What are you grinning about," John scolded. "Jesus, this is Mrs Hudson's fault isn't it, I _know_ she's been smoking again, even if I couldn't smell it I can hear her coughing." Shaking his head, "Or whoever's fault it is, you're egging each other on. WHY do you have to smoke at all??" John had never smoked and had simply never been able to understand why anyone did it - let alone someone as smart as Sherlock. Then again, Sherlock had been known to do many not smart things. But he wouldn't be doing them right in front of _John_ and not hear anything about it.  
  
"There's your tea," John pointed it out brusquely and set the biscuits down beside the mug. These things had to share the tiny end table with two pots of orchids. "I hope you know you _smell bad_ ," he added as he turned away again.  
  
"Nicotine patches just aren't the same," Sherlock sighed, taking up his tea and ignoring the biscuits, which John knew now were just his excuse for having gone downstairs to smoke. But later he did catch Sherlock sniffing at himself, and almost had to laugh. Almost.  
  
He was telling the truth, as it happened. The cigarettes did smell bad. They smelled bad on Sherlock, though Sherlock did not himself smell bad. Generally the opposite, unless he were studying something that happened to be very foul or acrid, and then Sherlock just ignored the unpleasantness in favour of what he stood to learn. Those unpleasant summer weeks with all the drowned corpses from the river was a standout in the mind in that department. There was only so much that dry cleaning could do.  
  
That evening, John fell asleep in his chair in the living room, and then woke in the wee hours to find Sherlock standing in the middle of the room, looking at him.  
  
"What," said John, rubbing at his face as though to scold the brain behind it back to life. It wasn't working. Darkness outside, middle of the night sort of quiet. Sherlock in pyjamas and t-shirt and dressing gown. He had his mobile phone in his hand, down by his side.  
  
"You called me," Sherlock said, slowly. Very slowly. Staring intently at John. There was only one light on in here, and not at all bright, so Sherlock's pupils were wide in the dimness.  
  
"What...?"  
  
"You called me, I thought you called me." Pause. "You were dreaming."  
  
John wondered if perhaps he were not dreaming now. Maybe they both were. Maybe that happened after a while when you lived with someone and were always together but - weren't anything else. Your dreams intersected. Your dream selves bumped into one another as they wandered about the flat. Look where you're going. Oh I'm so sorry.  
  
John started to close his eyes again.  
  
"Was I falling?"  
  
It was like a bucket of cold water dashed over him. John opened his eyes and recoiled and gripped the arms of the chair all at once. He was awake now!  
  
"Shut up!" he snapped. "You don't - you don't have the right to even ask me that."  
  
"Why don't I?"  
  
John pushed himself to his feet, feeling as though all his bones were creaking, how long was he sitting there, Rip van Watson covered with cobwebs, Sherlock walking by and never noticing. Except, maybe, if he wanted some of the spiders. John picked up his laptop.  
  
"Where are you going?"  
  
"Bed."  
  
Upstairs, John paced back and forth across his bedroom several times, gritting his teeth, and was only able to stop himself with the thought that Sherlock could hear him pacing. He was wide awake now. The alarm clock said three thirty-one. He was never going to get back to sleep.  
  
John sat down on the bed, woke the computer from hibernation and opened a blank new text file.

> Were you falling? You have the nerve, the gall, to ask me that, were you falling? Don't you understand - no, what am I thinking, look who I'm asking. UNDERSTAND, then, because I'm telling you, that you're always falling!

  
He'd never written about this on his blog, he'd never been able to speak any of the details to his therapist, or to anyone. Oh, Mrs Hudson though, she had heard some of it. She was there in the early days After, a few times - quite a few times he got drunk, and God knows what he'd said, what all he'd said. He remembered her crying, and he remembered her petting his head, making soothing noises while - it made him clench his eyes shut in embarrassment, remembering - while he sobbed with his head in her lap.

> And I don't have to be asleep and dreaming to see it. You made me see it so completely I will never stop seeing it. Were you falling, YES. And not just falling but looking down on me from above and controlling what I saw and lying to me, right to my face. Your fucking note. I know, I know, I KNOW WHY and I know why you did what you did but dammit, -

  
He almost typed 'Sherlock' here but restrained himself,

> you came back, but that doesn't mean you're not still falling. And you know... It's not just the falling. It's the rest of it. It's the part where you've fallen. It's blood on your face and pouring out from under your head, your hair all in it, your eyes open, Jesus, how did you keep from blinking. You didn't mention that part when you were crowing about how clever you are with your fucking stress ball and your homeless friends. And Molly.

  
He was typing a lot. Probably Sherlock could hear that, too, downstairs. Furious flurries of activity, then laborious click click clicks of the backspace key whenever he made a mistake, which was reasonably often. He was angry. He was sweating. His heart was pounding as though he were saying all these things aloud to Sherlock. No, his heart was pounding, and he was sweating, because war wasn't the only thing you could have PTSD about. He was reliving it again. The dizzy nausea, the disorientation after the man on the bicycle knocked him down. The pain all along his side and in his head where he struck the pavement. The terror and panic and the scream trapped in his throat.  
  
It was worse than anything John had ever seen or felt in Afghanistan. So much worse. Worse than being shot. Though he couldn't say so to anyone. It was worse, because it was deliberate. It was worse, because it was Sherlock.

> And you are back now, for you to be alive was all I wanted, you're alive like I wanted. So why do I want to kill you almost all the time?

  
He frowned at the screen. He didn't like what he had just typed. He took his hands away from the laptop keyboard and laced his fingers together, trying to still them, but they got loose again and reached for the keys.

> Smoking again now, another flavour of suicide?, you complete and utter twat. STOP KILLING YOURSELF IN FRONT OF ME!!!

  
But that was the thing, wasn't it. Sherlock wasn't ever going to stop falling, arms flailing at nothing, falling, coat flapping in the wind of the plunge from the rooftop of Bart's. Down, down, down.  
  
***  
Sherlock can always hear John walking upstairs, but his senses are especially acute just now and he can distinctly hear typing. Emotional typing. Bursts of activity cutting off in silence.  
  
Why doesn't he have the right to ask about something he's done?  
  
Sherlock tries to ponder ways of finding out the answer to this question but he is having trouble organising. The dose may have been too much. The delivery method wasn't very efficient either. He frowns at the nearest pot of orchids.  
  
"He's right, you do smell funny," he tells them, spitefully.  
  
They just sit there refusing to look at him. He huffs in annoyed impatience and ignores them even more.  
  
Distantly he is aware that the dosage is definitely, definitely a bit too high, too high to be useful or even diverting. He goes reeling around the living room with the sides of his dressing-gown held out like wings. Not flapping wings. Undignified. Soaring wings, coasting wings, like a flying squirrel.  
  
Flying squirrel... does not sound cool. He lets go of his wings and scowls at the orchids. Well. Some orchids. It is a different pot. But they are all the same aren't they.  
  
John is still typing. He's typing so much that it has to be about Sherlock. He's typing so late at night that it has to be about Sherlock also. But then he stops typing and doesn't start again. Why did he stop??  
  
It would be terrible if he ever runs out of things to type about Sherlock. Could that ever happen? That can never happen. He will have to be clever, clever, clever. He will have to be enigmatic. He will be annoying, that happens even when he doesn't want to be. What else can he do?  
  
Thirsty. And nauseated. Both at once, annoying and inconvenient. Saliva keeps filling his mouth. Horrible. He gets water and struggles for a while with the nausea. Vomiting is a last resort. He'd rather avoid it. It would do nothing to alleviate too much orchid extract absorbed under the tongue. The thought of how it tasted makes his stomach lurch inside him.  
  
Too too much too much. Self titration is so tricky. Absolutely no question of using John as a test subject again, it made him so angry, and that was before. Sherlock had scoured the internet but as he seems to be the first to be trying what he is trying there was little help apart from superfluous semi-practical tips in refining the extract and making the tincture. Dosage information is sketchy enough on known drugs, and as far as Sherlock is able to determine, there are no drugs forums devoted to orchid use.  
  
He finds himself standing in front of John's chair again as though John were still sitting there asleep, but the chair is empty and John is upstairs and quiet now, no typing, no footsteps, all clear. Sherlock curls up in his chair and wonders why he can't ask whether he did something wrong. It used to be easy to ask John and John would always tell him. Now John is filled with things he doesn't say.  
  
Really, next time, a much smaller dose, much much much increased in smallness. Fortunate that it's not like with belladonna, you can have too much without it killing you, there is a margin of error for having a beastly time and your mouth filling up with spit. Ugh, appalling.  
  
It does seem to be easing off a bit now, or perhaps it goes in waves?  
  
Then the shivering starts. Yes. It goes in waves.  
  
This is not at all what he wanted. He grips the arm of John's chair as though he were gripping John's arm, trying to convince him. I wasn't trying to get high, he imagines explaining. This isn't the same as boredom, he imagines adding. Then he imagines the angry incomprehension on John's face.  
  
And the smoking, it is hardly even his fault, except that he stopped trying to resist it. It happened in the time when he was away and John hates that time and talking about it is not good. But Sherlock was in eastern Europe for almost a year and the nicotine patches there were not worth having and though the cigarettes were hardly better, at least they worked, and even smoking is not about pleasure but about the Work, about making his brain function better, that's all any of it ever was.  
  
Well, smoking is also pleasure, but Sherlock didn't even know that until he tried it for the other reason. So the pleasure is a sort of reward and nothing worth worrying about or mentioning to anyone. Mrs Hudson doesn't even believe him when he tells her they help him think. Or, she sounds like she believes him, but then blithely goes on to talk about John, making him too self conscious to fully enjoy the cigarette.  
  
Sherlock closes his eyes and feels the chair, the flat, the world swaying around him. Distracting body effects. Does not help with the nausea.  
  
He can't even tell right now if this is on the right track, chemically, but definitely, definitely, he will be using  less next time.  
  
It is around this time that the visual effects really get going.  
  
But there's nothing at all useful about them, they're not even of aesthetic interest, such as that is. Loops and streamers of light hanging around Sherlock's retinas, pointlessly. They are of no interest, except as a sign of overdosage. Also they are distracting. He closes his eyes. Streaks of light continue to strobe behind closed lids. But with his eyes closed his sense of smell seems to heighten and the chair smells like John. Oh, it also smells like a chair, of course, but overlaid on its original nature, the scent of its owner is clear to discern.  
  
For some reason it helps his stomach to settle down. Familiar. Reassuring.  
  
He went a little over two years without smelling that scent. He didn't realise he was missing it till he smelled it again. Oh, it's not that he didn't realise he missed _John_ \- that went entirely without saying - but the scent specifically, it is like the smoking, really - the pleasure is a side effect. It has nothing to do with the rest of it. It? Anything.  
  
Right at the moment it is more than a side effect, it's keeping him grounded. Chaired. He snorts with laughter and pushes his sweating face into the back of the chair, breathing in, and he's all curled up in order to be able to do this, one leg hanging off. He spreads his toes out. This provokes a cramp that feels as though it will curl his leg up into a knot. It hurts. He has to jump up out of the comforting smelling chair and stomp around to relieve it. Then he collapses back into John's chair.  
  
Why is he doing this, again?  
  
Something to do with his brain. Right, his brain. It's not working properly. He was trying to make it better but this is worse, he's made himself stupider than John. Has he? No, wait, because John is not actually stupid, he just seems that way sometimes.  
  
How long will this take to wear off? How long has it even been? What if this damages his brain?  
  
 _Yeah, now you think of that, that's great, that's just brilliant,_ says John in his head.  
  
Sherlock hasn't heard John in his head since his time away. He's been able to hear the real John's voice since then, and so he hasn't needed to hear the John in his head. In that time back then, John's voice had reminded him when he was dangerously in need of food or rest. Once it warned him that someone was behind him. He had tried to delete the memory of that, but it bobs up now regardless.  
  
It is nothing to worry about, it's just a coping mechanism, he'd got used to John being there and even though Sherlock was the one who left, it was hard to go back to being alone. The skull got left behind, of course. John nicked it and put it in his office. Sherlock has it back now, but it's not in the living room. It's in the bathroom.  
  
Music. Music would help. The violin seems a long, long way away, though. Even if it were in his hands, it seems that it would be a lot of trouble to have to lift it up. And his brain might be too stupid for his hands to play it. This seems distinctly possible.  
  
He starts humming, Mendelssohn's Lieder. His voice is a poor substitute for a musical instrument, though he can use it as one when he's talking. Sherlock just gets - impatient with the rhythm of melody, it's not communicating anything, just... reciting. He always hated _reciting_. Humming notes, however, is an interesting compromise. Sherlock closes his eyes, follows the song, tries to imagine some construction of words that would naturally incorporate that exact rhythm... and then realises that he is inadvertently composing lyrics to go with the Song Without Words.  
  
 _You prat_ , says John in his head. _Shut up and go to sleep._  
  
***  
Emma Hudson has always been a light sleeper. This has on the whole been more a good thing than bad in her life (which has been a bit more exciting than some might suppose), but with Sherlock living upstairs, sleep is an elusive sort of animal sometimes. While it's true that the bedroom, just over hers, is as quiet as her own is, and sometimes quieter, _ahem_ \- the goings on in the living room and the kitchen are just not to be believed and there it is again, not just pacing about but actually jumping up and down. Pacing _could_ be John, though not likely at this hour - not anymore. _Jumping_ is always going to be Sherlock. He's a bratty great child in a grown body, a dangerous combination, because he can buy cigarettes and smelly chemicals and things that explode. And bring home bits from the mortuary. To keep in her fridge!  
  
Mind you, she likes this childishness about him sometimes, sometimes it's very nice. He treats her like she was his mum, and she _knows_ he has a mother living, because she's heard Mycroft talk about "Mummy" in present tense when trying to get Sherlock to do something at Christmas. Emma would be glad to pretend not to be listening to the things she overhears, but there's no need because they seldom notice she's there, except of course when they want something.  
  
The jumping abruptly stops and all is quiet again above. She adjusts her position, cuddles her head against her pillow, and tries to go back to sleep, but it's no use. She's wide awake now, and lying here will do her no good. She may as well get up. Besides, she'd like a cigarette, and she has an iron clad rule to never, never smoke in bed.  
  
It's cold: she puts on her warmer dressing gown over her nightie and gets her slippers on, having to dig one out from under the bed where she'd accidentally kicked it. She goes into the kitchen, bleary eyed and yawning.  
  
There are only a few left in the pack. Emma lights one and inhales. She could put the telly on, the little one here on the kitchen table, but although she is alone, and no one could possibly hear it even if she turned it up, and even though they would deserve to hear it upstairs for waking her up, she doesn't turn it on.  
  
In the old days, before Sherlock pretended to die, there had been shouting upstairs sometimes, sometimes just John, sometimes both of them, but there has been little of that since Sherlock came back from pretending to be dead. There hasn't been much of the violin either, but that was nothing to complain about, not that there is anything wrong with the violin and he plays it very well, but she really only likes it when he plays tunes she knows, like at Christmas. All those special things, with composers, they're pretty, but you couldn't really tap your foot and hum along to them, could you?  
  
She'd had to hide the violin for a while. John had kept looking for it and she was sure he meant to smash it. It wasn't right for something like that to be smashed, no matter the reason. And suppose Sherlock's ghost had known about it, imagine how awful an angry, _clever_ ghost could be. Now imagine as clever as Sherlock, and how much he loves that violin. No, she pinched it and hid it from John's grief and rage and she didn't give it back till Sherlock was alive again. She's glad. Sherlock had looked so glad when she brought it up to him. John had looked startled.  
  
But  Emma never even said why she had it, and it hadn't been John's fault, of course it hadn't. It was simply awful what Sherlock did - what he must have _had_ to do, because no one could be so cruel to John Watson. It's a miracle, honestly a miracle. Not that Sherlock could come back. If anyone could, Sherlock could! But it's a miracle that John is still alive. He wanted to kill himself, she knows he did. He told her so.  
  
He told her so, a lot of times. He told her... a lot of things. Only some of them surprised her.  
  
Back in the happy times she'd seen him drinking once or twice. A beer, a glass of wine, and once she'd come home at the same time as he did when he'd been down the pub with old soldier friends he was singing and fragrant with beer. And gallant to Emma, bowing and holding the door for her and bowing again before singing on up the stairs. That had been her mental picture of 'John pissed' until the bad times came. Now that picture is a lot different.  
  
And who could blame him. Oh, the poor darling. She'd never seen such grief, ever. Not like this. Her own sadness at the loss of Sherlock seemed pale and thin in comparison.  
  
And she still thought that even after she understood that they had not, they had not _ever_ been lovers. She had truly, honestly thought that they were! She had just thought John was denying it because he was the sort that did - military and all, who could blame him? But she saw them together, all the time, saw how much like a wife John was, (like a wife could be to a good husband), lovingly nagging and scolding; and she saw Sherlock _change_ in the time they were together. Not completely, of course not! But he did change. He did soften a little toward someone other than herself. She'd thought those two were really rather sweet as couples went - both a bit mad, both a bit broken by the world - a good fit, a good match. Good for each other.  
  
So how shocked she'd felt to learn, once John was widowed, that they'd never been like that at _all_. And how sad to realise from everything he said, in broken little bits, how he had wanted to, but had been afraid. That was the thing she had seen and assumed he was lying about. She _believed_ him when he said he wasn't gay, in general; she did see him try with women, however pathetically, but Sherlock is special, isn't he. And lovely, surely even a man can see that. Not even fair, the way some men look.  
  
He hasn't tried in the longest time - since Sherlock has been alive again, John hasn't brought any women back to the flat.  
  
Maybe he sees someone when he goes out, he does go out sometimes, but somehow Emma doesn't think so. He's lost a little bit of that friendly nature that used to help him connect with girls, and without it, well. He might be a doctor, but he does seem sort of invisible sometimes, and when he doesn't even try...  
  
If only, now that Sherlock is back...? She had tried to ask Sherlock just yesterday if they were getting along all right, but he only said 'Of course' and then he was off and away like a snake had bit him. Stealing biscuits! a child again. Honestly.  
  
She stubs her cigarette out and gets up to make the coffee. No sense going back to bed now.


	2. Chapter 2

John woke up grinding his teeth. He'd had another dream about Moriarty. That was a dream guest appearance he hadn't had while Sherlock - that he hadn't had in the time After... only Since.  
  
Why couldn't he think about it directly, given that he thought about it all the time?  
  
Moriarty, alive, standing apart (so as not to get his hands dirty) but speaking into John's ear, directly in, invading him, while he sweated under the unwelcome embrace of the Semtex vest and the thick grey parka.  
  
Speaking all the things he said all over again... not the things Moriarty made him say to Sherlock, but the things he had said into John's ear before Sherlock arrived at the pool. The things he had said to make John do what he was told to do, say what he was told to say.  
  
And the other things, the things that Moriarty had said just for fun.  
  
...No. Jim Moriarty was dead, really actually dead, and all his lies were long dispersed, they won, he lost, end of story.  
  
John was just... unsettled by reminders of the fall. There really wasn't anything else to it, and nothing he could tell a therapist would change anything.  
  
He'd thought he had got his feelings all out by typing, last night. And speaking of that, he would have to hide that file, or else delete it, unless he wanted Sherlock not only reading it but correcting his grammar.  He reached for the laptop, which he'd shoved onto the bedside table, and opened it. Battery getting low, he'd have to find the charger cord.  
  
The file was still open, Untitled, and he hesitated a long time deciding, but in the end he saved it. He gave it a dull name and shoved it into a folder with things for taxes. Surely this was the last place Sherlock would bother himself to snoop.  
  
He looked at his blog. Nothing new since the 'pieces' comment. Then he looked at Sherlock's site.  
  
There was a new message there, from this morning. It said, Does the doctor give the orders?  
  
He couldn't see the IP address, he didn't have access. But he was willing to bet it was the same person. Cryptic little questions.  
  
Now the computer was complaining that its battery was knackered and he had to shut it. John carried it downstairs in search of a cord and some coffee, and found Sherlock in his chair in the living room, curled up in an absurd position, fast asleep.  
  
This was really unusual. Sherlock didn't like to sleep in the living room. In fact, he made a lot of shitty remarks about it when John dozed off there, in his chair, and now look. Sherlock, sleeping in the living room, in John's chair. A completely undignified position, too. One long leg hanging off the side. Face cuddled into the back of the chair. He was definitely sleeping, unless he was doing some sort of experiment that called for deep even breathing and eventual muscle cramps.  
  
There was his mobile, lying on the floor. John sighed and picked it up. The neverending little things. And, he glanced up at the orchids everywhere, the neverending medium things. But these were low level irritants. Even the smoking, if he were to admit the bare truth, even the smoking was nowhere near so bad as no Sherlock in the world.  
  
So he slipped the phone into the pocket of Sherlock's dressing gown and then dropped a blanket over top of him and went into the kitchen to make coffee as quietly as he knew how.  
  
It turned out not to matter if he had made it at top volume with a brass band accompanying, Sherlock slept so deeply that when he finally woke up and tried to walk his legs didn't work. He went down so hard that John ran to him without conscious thought, and he felt a flash of it all again, the dizzy pain, rushing to the side of Sherlock fallen -  
  
But this was ridiculous, he fell down from a standing position. What was next, was he going to break into a sweat when Sherlock sat down suddenly?  
  
"What's the matter with you," he heard himself scolding when the ringing in his ears started to clear. Sherlock was uncoordinated and didn't quite seem to know where he was for a moment. More than a moment.  
  
What had he been doing to himself this time?  
  
"Here, come on, I'll help you." He could at least put him back into the chair, sitting the right way. Obviously his leg or legs fell asleep in that stupid position he slept in. Why he had done that, well, why did Sherlock do anything? No one could read minds, and even if they could, no one could read a mind like that without a map. And a GPS. And a bloody sherpa.  
  
Sherlock clutched at John's shoulders for a moment, then went spinning away like a moth toward the bathroom. Well, at least his limbs were working again. John sighed and turned away.  
  
Things got a little better for a while. John felt so much better after writing out his feelings that he felt surely he'd hit on the thing he just never got with the therapist: silence. The things he needed to say could be said into silence, to nobody, because it was just important that you got it out, got it out of your system. You didn't need to hear the little judgmental noises or the scratching of the pen on the notebook in that particular way that you knew meant it was writing something about _issues_ or _tendencies_.  
  
John supposed he could make another blog, if he ever felt like the silence was too self contained to just talk to oneself. But that added another layer of detectability by Sherlock, and fate did not _need_ any more temptations when it came to Sherlock.  
  
The next time he found Sherlock sleeping in the chair, about a week later, Sherlock was stark naked.  
  
"Sherlock? What are you - _oh sweet Jesus._ "  
  
And in the same weird position, too, face hidden in the back of the chair, leg hanging off, and... much too much visibility of a lot else.  
  
"Why does it have to be MY CHAIR?"  
  
"Too loud," Sherlock groaned into the chair.  
  
"If you're going to turn into a bloody nudist at least sit on a TOWEL!"  
  
"Owww."  
  
John got the same blanket as last time, but instead of quietly dropping it over Sherlock he threw it over him like a net to trap an animal.  
  
"Where do you think you are," John said, still loudly. "The Palace?"  
  
Sherlock pulled the blanket back from his head and stared with bleary incredulity at John.  
  
Then suddenly, they were both laughing.  
  
***  
Sherlock did not mean to be caught naked in John's chair. He had meant to vacate it this time long before John caught him in it. But he is still having trouble getting the dosage right, and somehow using less can actually heighten the effect rather than reduce it. This makes no sense, but all he has to judge by is the effect on himself and his thinking. And somehow last night, at about half two, his thinking had been very insistent on the point that his clothes were constraining him and curtailing his mental freedom.  
  
He's not even sure where he left them. He had been in a giddy state, feeling as though his feet were not quite in contact with the floor, and suddenly he could feel every seam and every button in his clothes, crowding and squeezing and pinching him. Absolutely detrimental to any sort of brain work let alone a project as delicate and specialised as this.  So obviously they had to go. He was a bit cold without them, maybe, but not all the time. From time to time he would be overwhelmed by heat and he was entirely comfortable. And when he felt cold he moved around the flat.  
  
Now, though, in the cold light of day, his head is hurting and John is angry to find Sherlock in his chair again. He doesn't even remember that he is naked until he tries to move and finds his skin inclined to stick to the leather of the chair. He'd thought last night, vaguely, that he would dress or move before morning, but obviously, he lost consciousness between then and now.  
  
Fortunately, though, it strikes John as funny, and so hopefully there will not be a lot of questions. It's not that he minds lying about it, but lying is harder with a headache, and Sherlock knows that John will not like his experimenting on himself this way. Never mind that it's the only way to learn what he wants to know.  
  
Sherlock peels himself out of the chair - slowly and carefully - and wraps the blanket around himself. It's rather small for the purpose, but it makes John feel better. John's sense of modesty is peculiarly acute for a medical doctor.  
  
"Something wrong with your bed?" John asks, but not in a way that wants information.  
  
Sherlock ignores this question since it is not a question. Of course there is nothing wrong with his bed. His bed is normal, comfortable, entirely serviceable.  
  
But it doesn't smell like John. And when his experimental efforts overwhelm him he needs something that smells like John to remind him where earth is. It was always like that, to some extent - John himself, not his scent in particular - but now it is acute, it is the only thing that will help, he knows this instinctively, though he would prefer to reject such thoughts.  
  
He doesn't realise he is standing there, staring at nothing, with the blanket clutched around him, until John says, " _Sherlock_."  
  
"What...?"  
  
"What is the matter with you? I said - _go and take a shower_. Or else go lie down! You're asleep on your feet."  
  
"Mm." Slowly, glacially slowly, Sherlock complies. When John gets a certain tone it is just easiest to go along.  
  
He almost gives up on the whole experiment before he has a bit of a breakthrough. It seems that it works better when he has had something to eat a few hours beforehand. This has the happy side effect of pleasing John, because John has always liked to see Sherlock eat. It is one of those mothering behaviours that people notice and about which John gets so defensive. Sherlock does not mind it, except when it gets a touch too strident in tone. It is not easy to mollify or misdirect John when things get to that level. But anything short of that is actually more helpful than not, and he missed it enough when he was away that the John in his head had started talking.  
  
He gives in and has a few bites of pasta alfredo when John keeps shoving it at him, and though he is right, it is quite good, Sherlock grumbles all the way through and for some time after, just to keep John from being too triumphant about it and making remarks about eating more often. Victory just makes him greedy. If Sherlock obliges him too often he will either be suspicious of what Sherlock is really up to, or else become too accustomed to being obeyed. Neither of these options suit him. It's all very well for John to be right about something from time to time, but he can be unbearable about rubbing it in and insisting on it being acknowledged.  
  
That evening, the orchid tincture is at its most promising. It is so close, so very close to what he wants. He doesn't feel nauseated at all, the light effects are just low level sparkliness, and though it would be _nice_ to take all his clothes off, he doesn't feel as though he has to in order to think. And the thinking feels good. It's like his skull has enlarged around his brain and given it breathing room. It's like his mind has room to dance. This is almost exactly what he wanted. It might be said it is precisely what he wanted when he began. If Sherlock's mind could be compared to an orrery, a great celestial clockwork machine, then it is moving at just the right speed, smoothly revolving and rotating, vast with reach and velocity. Elegant in its workings. Dangerous, if you got in its path.  
  
But there's still something missing.  
  
It occurs to Sherlock afterward that the fat content in the alfredo sauce must have been the key, that molecules binding to fat molecules had changed how it crossed the blood brain barrier. He could find a way to prepare it differently, but he has already made a good large batch of _Psychilis cogniauxii_ tincture and it does no harm to let John see him eating more. That he has been sleeping more has already been noticed.  
  
Then the horticultural supply finally delivers the _atropa belladonna_ he'd been asking for in the first place.  
  
It smells horrible, so he has to wait for John to go out for at least eight hours. John seems disinclined to do this until Sherlock makes himself increasingly more unpleasant, wearing John down until John snaps at him and grabs his coat. Perfect. Sherlock has all the equipment ready and waiting, and he doesn't need to process much, he can even save most of it for the original experiment, now sidelined. The flat still smells bad when John comes home to complain of it, but Sherlock now has a dropper-bottle of something very promising indeed.  
  
Orchids under his tongue. Belladonna in his eyes. He is very, very, _very_ careful with the belladonna. The margin of error is terribly fine with belladonna. He will never hear the end of it from John if he poisons himself... that is, _if_ he poisons himself, _and_ survives, _and_ John finds out about it.  
  
Sherlock just goes straight to John's chair in the first place, as soon as he feels the effects sweeping over him, and sits with a glass of water in his easy reach. The violin, too, he has moved closer, so he can have it if he happens to want it. He hasn't wanted it yet, since the first time, but he had wanted it then. He turns out the lights, because his pupils are dilated so wide that he doesn't need them: the spillthrough from the street is more than enough.  
  
He sits in the chair, breathes in John, closes his eyes, searches for calm in darkness shot with sparks. And his mind expands... filling with warmth like the expansion of a balloon... it becomes larger and more porous and passes through solid objects... through walls... through the ceiling, through the floor. It feels comfortable, pleasurable, but it is disconcerting, because it is happening without his volition, he is pulled along with it. Like a dream. But he always knows when he is dreaming, and he is not dreaming now.  
  
He can hear John upstairs. He can hear Mrs Hudson downstairs. Sherlock's hearing has become superhuman, impossibly acute, because he can hear both of them muttering to themselves under their breaths, words remote but distinct, and it is confusing, as though one is muttering into one of his ears and the other into the other. It's easy for him to tell them apart, though, their voices are clear and he can smell them, too, somehow. Amazing how much the brain can hold the senses back... it seems it would be the other way round.  
  
From below, Mrs Hudson, saying 'oh dear, oh shit, that really hurts, there we are, damn and hellfire,' she is sitting down in a chair and her hip is hurting her, 'it's just not fair, it only ever seems to get worse, damn it, damn the weather, damn, _damn_.  - Right. Something else to think about. What's on telly... oh what a horrible outfit, look at his hair, oh that will never do. Boring! Rude... Oh, I've seen that one... how many times?' She keeps on talking, how has he never overheard her before? Her voice is as loud as a radio broadcast. 'Quiet up there, that's something at least, night owl roosting for a change, and here I am awake, doesn't that just go to show...'  
  
From above, John, also clearly muttering. 'That horrible smell. I've smelled that before, where have I smelled that before, what's he up to, how do I find out.' Then, right on the heels of this, 'stop, why do you care, what does it matter, he'll do what he does, who can stop him? He'll always do just exactly what it suits him to do. He's eating yeah, but some sneaky reason, the look on his face. He is up to something. He's being weird. He's obsessed with my chair. And _that time_.' A ripple, the sound of a shiver? 'Why was he naked, what is he doing, why did I have to see that. If he's going to go around like that he might as well - stop stop STOP.'  
  
What on earth is he blathering about? Oh, about Sherlock of course, obviously, but _what_ might he stop? He knows it is unreasonable to expect people to make sense when they don't know they are being overheard, but that doesn't stop it being annoying.  
  
'Going to go mad. Maybe I'm already going mad? Maybe. Maybe.'  
  
That's absurd, though, John is more sane than anyone, that's why he balances Sherlock so well. That's why Sherlock came back to him, the very first day it was safe to do so. That's why he tried to make it an interesting surprise for John when he did come back, though of course _that_ didn't go the way Sherlock was expecting.  
  
He tries his best not to listen to Mrs Hudson below, with her hip complaints and her incessant opinions on everything on the television, and to concentrate his ears on hearing John above. John, who is asking himself if he is going mad, in as serious a tone as Sherlock has ever heard him use.  
  
'Make appointment? What's the use of that, it doesn't matter what I've got to say I can't say it to her. I can't say it to her. I don't _like_ her. I could switch to another but I won't like them either, I don't want to be asked nasty questions about things, about him. That's all she wants to do, it's all she wants to ask me about, sick of it, not calling her, better to go mad with a little fucking dignity,' and if that is a laugh, it is a strange sounding laugh - not like any sound he has ever heard John make. Sherlock shifts uneasily in the chair. The level of muttering would suggest someone agitated enough to pace the floor, but John is holding still: John is lying in his bed.  
  
Sherlock is terribly thirsty. He takes a drink of his water but when he tries to swallow, his throat seems to lock up and refuse it. An effect of the belladonna, probably. He has to wait agonizingly slow moments for this effect to ease and let the water trickle down his parched throat. Pulse highly elevated. Roaring sound in his ears. But he can still hear Mrs Hudson and John. His hands, his palms are hot, fire hot, and he turns them to lie palm up on the armrests of John's chair.  
  
Downstairs it sounds now like Mrs Hudson might be crying. Someone on television has reminded her of her brother, Tom, who has been dead for almost twenty years - that's all Sherlock knows about him: she's mentioned him exactly once. 'That's how he looked, poor Tom, before it all went bad, such a shame, never took care of himself, things like that shouldn't have to happen,' and her voice tinged with tears, 'I told you to take better care of yourself, Tom...'  
  
Upstairs, it sounds as though John is chanting. Why would he be chanting, he doesn't pray, he doesn't believe in God, so what is he...?  
  
But he must be mistaken, because he is saying 'God', he is chanting, 'Oh God, oh God, please God,' curious form for a prayer but what else could that be. 'Jesus', more prayers, 'Jesus yes, do it, yes, suck me, oh God I'm going to _come_ ,' and finally Sherlock understands what he's eavesdropping on, what he's listening in on: this is sex talk, but John's alone; conclusion, he is masturbating. Touching himself. Imagining someone else. Just upstairs.  
  
Sherlock sits very, very straight in the chair, back not touching it, his pulse speeding up and slowing down in fitful waves.  
  
It isn't that he doesn't know about such things. It isn't that he doesn't know that John does things like that, either, he sort of vaguely assumed so, but in their flat? Well. It is his room, Sherlock supposes John can do whatever he likes to himself in there, but _he_ shouldn't have to hear it.  
  
He does _not_ have an erection. That is, the erection that he is currently experiencing is _not his_ , it is a side effect of the belladonna. _Obviously_. It has nothing to do with him. It is annoying and unwelcome. It may as well go away because nothing is going to be done about it.  
  
If a body part could ever detach itself and leave its owner out of sheer frustration and loathing, Sherlock's penis would have deserted him years ago. He would scarcely have missed it. It is ridiculous. He has _no_ intention of procreating; sex has no other purpose; it is a waste of time and attention, and a monstrous waste at that. If one is going to do something just because it feels good, one may as well be able to _think_ at the same time. That's what the _violin_ is for, for pity's sake.  
  
Idiot humans, bumping and groping and grinding into one another in the dark.  
  
And John, by himself, upstairs.  
  
But now John has gone quiet, just ragged breathing, and then that too changes and becomes slow and deep and even; he is asleep.  
  
Downstairs, Mrs Hudson is still murmuring at the television, 'so many rude things... that's just lovely, so expensive though... oh that's funny... when that actress was young didn't she look just like that last one John went with. Poor thing. Poor things all of them, I mean who could compete.'  
  
He frowns. He doesn't know what she's referring to. John never goes with girls who could be mistaken for actresses, and what does she mean compete?  
  
But she doesn't choose to oblige him by elaborating, and the old saying about eavesdroppers has seldom been better illustrated. Her murmuring becomes more and more disjointed and sleepy and then she too is breathing deeply, snoring a bit too, in her recliner downstairs.  
  
John sighs in his sleep and says something indistinct. He's been calling on God and on Jesus, but when he said 'suck me' he clearly meant someone else, some third entity, a Holy Ghost if you will. Sherlock squirms a little in the chair and then sternly tells himself to stop.  
  
It takes hours longer than he expected for the sweating and rushing feelings from the belladonna to ease off, and this time, when the orchids wear off and Sherlock needs to crash down into the quiet darkness of sleep, for the first time he doesn't feel right in John's chair. The smell is just as comforting as it was, it's not that that has changed. But the idea of waking up with John standing over him fills him with guilt this time. _He's obsessed with my chair_.  
  
How _blind_ John can be, wandering right past the truth with his hands stretched out in front of him. In other people this quality makes Sherlock bitterly dismissive of worthless stupidity. But usually the way John does it, he leads Sherlock past that truth so that Sherlock can notice it. That's how it is supposed to work. John could learn - maybe not completely, but if John truly wanted to, he could train himself to do a lot of what Sherlock can do. Sherlock is extremely intelligent but he is not a savant. He was not born with the ability to size things up and own them through understanding, he _acquired_ it. He devised a syllabus and taught it to himself. John could acquire it too but he prefers to believe he can't, that Sherlock is _truly_ special, and Sherlock likes very, very much to be _truly_ special to someone. Someone who actually feels that way and has nothing to gain. Someone who feels that way and doesn't feel _diminished_ by telling him so.  
  
Someone like John, who is a good and lawful sort of person, and not a broken mad mirror image like James Moriarty, who at best would have wanted to compete, and at worst - well. He did his worst. Almost. He died trying. Nor a creature like The Woman, obsessed with her empty rituals of, what had Mycroft called it, 'recreational scolding'.  
  
Mycroft is funny sometimes, but it never does to let him know it.  
  
Sherlock  stumbles down the hallway to his bedroom at the back, curls up in the center of his bed like a dying insect. But sleep won't really come, though he floats in darkness. His hearing is still painfully acute. It is five in the morning now and they are opening for the breakfast shift at Speedy's downstairs. He can distantly hear the cook swearing about someone not coming home last night. At some point Mrs Hudson gets up from her recliner, creaking and fretting painfully, and hobbles back to her bed.  
  
Sometime before he wakes, John says once, clearly, "Sherlock."  
  
In his bed, Sherlock turns over and curls up even tighter.  
  
Is he falling?


	3. Chapter 3

John woke up early, recoiled from the evidence of what he'd done to get to sleep, and crept downstairs to get a scalding hot shower. Sherlock was not in his chair, for once. His bedroom door was ajar. Actually sleeping in his bed? Would wonders never cease.  
  
John canceled out lingering traces of guilt with briskness, vigorously scrubbing and then focusing intently on getting dressed and making coffee. He didn't bother to try to be quiet; Sherlock had been sleeping so deeply of late that he hardly ever complained if...  
  
John frowned. Sherlock _had_ been sleeping very heavily of late. Hadn't he. Eating more, sleeping more, he had even put on a couple of pounds. It suited him. So John hadn't thought about it being odd... because he liked the results and thought they were an improvement, certainly better than prying. Maybe even his advice being taken for a change, even if only to humour him.  
  
But now it had been going on a while and Sherlock was acting stranger than usual and a pattern like that was likely to mean something nobody wanted: Sherlock was doing something to himself again, and not smoking either, which he had all but stopped, another recent bonus John had not wanted to pry too closely into. Something - substancewise. Something poisonous, in the end.  
  
 _I'll kill him if that's what he's doing, honestly, I will make him eat his fucking orchids till he chokes on them._  
  
This image disturbed him. Not for its violence, which was only cartoonish, but... He shook his head, shook it off, these were the thoughts you shook off because they were wrong, even though the bloody orchids really _did_ look a little bit like -  
  
John's mobile dinged in his pocket. He got it out, grateful for the derail on the unwelcome train of thought, it was a train to the badlands.  
  
Coffee please. SH  
  
The utterly lazy shit.  
  
Still. He _did_ say please.  
  
John poured a cup, dumped what looked like the right amount of sugar in (shuddering slightly at the ruination of perfectly good coffee) and stomped down the hall, less out of actual irritation and more in the way of warning Sherlock he was coming. It might not have been necessary to do this. John never had asked about it. He just did it because it was what he would want someone else to do.  
  
Sometimes you wanted not to be disturbed. Of course, this was Sherlock, and the coffee was not a surprise. He never looked at Sherlock, anyway. He only came in, plunked down the cup on the bedside table, said "There you go," and turned away again.  
  
"John?"  
  
"Now what?"  
  
"...Never mind."  
  
John sighed and went out to get the papers. Doing this was ostensibly in the service of Sherlock's cases - trawling through the news for strange occurrences and crimes, noodling around for patterns that might attract Sherlock's ever wandering attention - but it also gave a structure to John's day, and he had missed it in that between time, that empty time. He couldn't bear to look at the papers for months and months even long after the press had turned its vulture attention to other corpses.  
  
Ouch. John made himself wince with that thought.  
  
Anyway, he had had good cause to leave the papers, the telly, the internet all alone, and for longer than he had to, because there was no way to be sure when it was safe to look again. Even now there could arise some reference, some peripheral thing that would make John feel that damnable shortness of breath and the dizziness and the pain in his head. But most of the time it was safe, and of course, Sherlock was alive and his name was cleared, except with some people for whom it would be too great a loss of face to ever own up to being wrong.  
  
While he was in the queue at the shop, pile of newspapers under his arm, John saw Sarah come in for a bottle of water, and felt his stomach sink as she caught sight of him too, and saw her face waver and close up in anxiety.  
  
"John," she said, in a voice that also wavered between friendly and cautious, and he looked down for a moment, embarrassed. Then he squared his shoulders and looked up, because there was nothing for it but to go through it.  
  
"Sarah," and his voice sounded reasonably normal, that was good. She was dressed in nicer clothes than he had ever seen her wear, and her hair looked nice. "You look well. How are you?"  
  
"Oh," she said, and he could see her relaxing at his reassuring display of normalcy. "Well, I'm well. And you - ?"  
  
"I'm good, yeah," he said, and tried for a smile, but he could see from the way Sarah's wavered that it wasn't a very good effort.  
  
"And Sherlock - ?"  
  
John tried to stay cheery and not flinch at the sound of the name. "Yeah, he's good too. Same old, you know. You know how he is." He looked down. She did, and she did not. But there was no one he could say any real things to, no one who would hear. And Sarah was wearing an engagement ring. Sherlock would have seen it instantly, but it had taken John till just now.  
  
"Er. Congratulations," gesturing at her hand, and she went pink, but her smile was genuine.  
  
She was about to start telling John about him. Her new man, her fiance. John could see it coming like the punchline of an old joke. She was about to say what his name was and what he did, and then something about how wonderful he was and how happy she was and it just -  
  
"Oh - damn - forgot milk," he said, and just walked away from her and her punchline, out of the queue, toward the coolers in the very back. Just to get away from her. Though they did need milk, and he did get some.  
  
Thankfully, Sarah did not pursue him to the back of the shop, and when he got back up to the front she was nowhere to be seen. He relaxed, paid for papers and milk.  
  
Not so thankfully, she was waiting for him outside, hunched up against the cold wind, her face pinched with worry. The pavement was busy with people already, but she was standing in the lee of a sandwich board advertising Hot Breakfasts. Her bottle of water from the shop protruded slightly from under her arm. She didn't have any gloves on.  
  
He was too surprised to be able to conceal his dismay at seeing her there. He could see that by her face, reflecting and refining that dismay. Sarah had always been nice. He shouldn't do anything to hurt her.  
  
"John," she said, and though again he knew what was coming and wanted to hear it even less than the litany of the lovely lovely fiance, he braced himself and just let her get on with it. Maybe it would be over sooner.  
  
"Are you okay? You look... a bit..." She trailed off. As though realising that what she had been about to say would sound insulting.  
  
"A bit what?" he prompted her, in hopes of speeding this up.  
  
"Lonely," she said.  
  
He frowned. He didn't even know what that was supposed to look like. But then it occurred to him that it was probably just Sarah trying to be nicer than to say _You're still not seeing anyone are you._  
  
"And angry," she added, so there went the idea of her just being nice.  
  
"I'm okay," he said evenly.  
  
"Please tell me he's at least treating you decently - "  
  
And now, he knew, he _did_ look angry. She knew him, and she knew better than to talk like that. Talking about Sherlock in that way. She knew better, and he was cold and he was going home now.  
  
"Going now. Nice to see you." Those last words were flat with falsehood. He turned away from her dismay and left her there, merging into and swept along by the pedestrian traffic before she could say another word.  
  
When he came back into the flat he smelled that _smell_ again, lingering since yesterday. It was foul, a foul plant smell that burned the back of his nose. He hadn't noticed it anymore after being in the flat with it for a while, but going out and coming back in again brought it to his attention all over again. It was _disgusting_. What was it? And what was it for?  
  
Up in the flat he dumped the papers on the table beside the fruit bowl, which was empty except for a note that read MORE APPLES.  
  
Such a lazy shit, yet he could go to so much _trouble_ being a lazy shit.  
  
Sherlock was in the bathroom, John could hear the shower going. Whether he'd just started or had been in there a while, he was going to be in there a while more. He drifted into the kitchen and looked at the stuff lying scattered around the microscope. None of it said anything to John. Whatever the smell was, its source was not obvious. But he had been gone a long time yesterday (he'd fallen asleep for a while in the public library until a security guard rousted him) and Sherlock had had time to do some cooking of whatever the horrible thing was and then... what? Refined it down into something? He went to all that trouble, so it must be _somewhere_.  
  
But it wasn't exactly like Sherlock to go helpfully labelling anything; if he labelled anything at all his notations were cryptic and illegible to John. John knew that was probably not even on purpose - or at least, was not meant to keep John in the dark specifically.  
  
But he was looking for the newest thing, and he knew what it smelled like.  
  
John searched until he heard the water stop, twenty minutes later, but found nothing that answered his questions, despite finding several things which prompted more questions. There were some instruments which had clearly been snaffled from Bart's mortuary, thrown in the drawer with the egg whisk and corkscrew and things.    
  
Then John remembered the invoice that came with the orchids. Hadn't there been another delivery, two or three days ago? Wasn't it from the same place, same kinds of stickers on the outside of the box?  
  
Sherlock still had not emerged from the steamy cocoon of the bathroom - probably he was shaving, he used a straight razor, it took a while.  
  
Straight razor scraping over his throat. Just one more fucking terrific thing for John to get to think about. Was he never, _never_ going to stop flinching at every other thought? Was he never going to get over it, that worst thing in the world that happened to him, that turned out didn't even happen?  
  
 _Please tell me he's at least treating you decently._ What on earth had she expected him to say to that?  
  
 _\- Well, okay, all right then, Sarah, he is 'treating me decently'. If by 'decently' you mean exactly the same as ever, only with the added decency of very thoughtfully hiding some horrible new habit I can't even imagine, and by 'treating' you mean treating me to the sight of him sleeping naked in my chair._  
  
The box was gone, but the receipt might still be somewhere in the many piles of papers teetering here and there on every surface that was not already claimed by orchid pots. There seemed to be fewer of these today, actually, though not by any dramatic amount. They were still in the way everywhere.  
  
John felt a surge of excitement when he spied the right sort of piece of paper, but it turned out it was only the same one he had seen, the one for the orchids. Disappointing. He looked at it again.  
  
 _Psychilis cogniauxii,_ what a highblown name for a flower, but it was probably better that it hadn't had a more descriptive name. _Phallic-ish obnoxii_ , John would have called them.  
  
But there was another item mentioned on the invoice. Not something that had been shipped with the orchids - something that had been sent back, and was being credited against the orchids, though the comparative amounts made the return credit seem a drop in a bucket. 'Amaryllis b. sent in error/ b. atropa separate ship'.  
  
John frowned at this line but could make no sense of it for a moment. He was setting the sheet back down where he found it when he realised that the thing separately shipped was surely the source of the horrible smell. It was the newest thing. And whatever _b. atropa_ was, it was the thing Sherlock had tried to order in the first place.  
  
By the time Sherlock came out of the bathroom at last, releasing a fully formed cloud of steam out into the flat that billowed like fog, John had googled up an understanding that the "b" common to both plants was _belladonna_. The company had mistaken an order for belladonna, as in _deadly nightshade_ , as in _poison_ , for an order for belladonna lilies; and then Sherlock had sent them back and ordered actual deadly nightshade, and that was the horrible smell. The _new_ horrible smell on top of the existing horrible smell of the nasty orchids. Which must be mixed up in this thing too, whatever it was. This new secret Sherlock was about to give up.  
  
Or else John really was going to shove one of those orchids down his throat, and to _hell_ with what it looked like.  
  
***  
  
Sherlock is feeling much better. That is, until he comes out into the living room and stops short at the look of righteous thunder on John's face.  
  
John has found out something, but what?  
  
"Sherlock. What is the belladonna for?"  
  
Ah yes, the belladonna, its smell lingered much more than Sherlock had expected, the vent fan had been entirely inadequate to the purpose. It was the weak link. John has never even asked what the orchids were for, Sherlock had assumed he didn't particularly care.  
  
"For an experiment." Completely true, of course. "I wanted to see if it was detectable when mixed in with different types of envelope glue." This is a half truth. That is what he wanted it for in the first place. He is still intending to make those experiments, too. But it is not what he's doing now.  
  
John narrows his eyes and Sherlock just gazes back at him with his blandest possible expression, a bit bored with the question, perhaps preoccupied with something far more important than the ongoing conversation, an expression that infuriates John and usually brings an unwanted line of questioning to a quick, frustrated halt.  
  
It doesn't work this time, though. John is easy to fool when he's not suspicious. When he is, however, he is actually something of a challenge. Like now.  
  
"For a case." Flatly said, not even a question.  
  
"No," and Sherlock does not have to manufacture the honesty in his tone answering this, "for my web site. I wanted to do a series on the classic poisons. Thought it might be more interesting to the _populace_ than a good thorough catalogue of tobacco ash."  
  
For some reason, mention of the web site diverts John from the belladonna question. He actually glances toward his computer, which is sitting on the arm of his chair. Sherlock would like to know why, but asking now is an obvious mistake. Curiosity is one thing, but sometimes it must take second chair to sneakiness. Perhaps it was just the word _populace_.  
  
But John seems to recollect his thoughts and his suspicious look has returned. "That sounds innocent. So why did you drive me out of the flat instead of just _warn_ me it was going to smell like... like... _shit_ in here?"  
  
This is a good question. Sherlock has no choice, really.  
  
"Because you get so upset about dangerous things."  
  
John gives an incredulous, negating laugh. "I like dangerous things."  
  
"I mean _me_ and dangerous things. Or places. Don't be dense."  
  
It is an incredibly effective tactic. John even recoils a little, eyes wide. Sherlock manufactures a look of mild concern. "Problem?"  
  
"I'm..." John is sort of deflating, looking around as though for inspiration or escape. "You..."  
  
Sherlock waits. Either John will grasp at one or two more feeble questions in an effort to understand what Sherlock is trying to prevent him understanding, or he will give up and bail out again, withdrawing from the situation. The difficulty this might present is, John's last-ditch questions can sometimes be disconcertingly to the point. And his withdrawals are disruptive to the household routine. Sherlock needs to be able to count on some solitude for his experiments. They make his hearing so acute that the thought of someone talking in the same room is not a welcome one. Also, John is the one who decides what they'll eat and does something about it, and dinner at a regular hour is a priority for Sherlock just lately.  
  
John turns as though to go, but then turns back. This is usually a bad sign for Sherlock. These are the moments when he can turn into that Columbo character for one last devastating question. 'One more thing!'  
  
"You know, you've hidden things from me before, but there's been a reason, you've usually had _reasons_. Some better than others, but still. Whatever you're hiding now - you're not doing it to protect me this time. Nobody is threatening anybody. So there's no excuse. You're just having _fun_."  
  
"That's not - "  
  
"Yes it is, and let's think, what sort of thing do you find fun that you would hide from me," and the gimlet stare makes Sherlock inwardly regret even thinking the word 'feeble' before. John's slightly on the wrong track, of course, in that way that he has, but so close too, likewise. He is thinking of drugs, ordinary drugs. He's on the wrong track.  
  
"Let me see your arms," says John.  
  
Sherlock blinks at him.  
  
"Now! Show me. Arms." And he points at the inside of his own arm: he is talking about the median cubital veins, he suspects Sherlock of injecting, what, belladonna? That's just absurd. Even John wouldn't think that. He _must_ be thinking of morphine, cocaine, heroin. _Ordinary_ things. Sherlock looks coldly offended as he unbuttons his cuffs and submits to inspection - an inspection he'd never stand still for if there were the slightest chance he could fail. John should have known that as soon as Sherlock started to comply. There are his arms, there are his veins, his skin is so pale they are easily visible within, and they are untouched by track marks.  
  
"Are you satisfied?"  
  
John is frowning, he's _not_ satisfied, but his current line of suspicion has just struck a wall. "I suppose. Sorry. It's just, you've just been - acting - different. ...Sorry." He seems really defeated now, and Sherlock would feel a _little_ bit of guilt about it, if it weren't for his own success in deflecting attention from activities he has every intention of continuing.  
  
So he tries, just a little, as he tugs his shirt sleeves back down and starts buttoning the cuffs. "John. I am not endangering myself unnecessarily. I'm doing experiments. I'm satisfying my curiosity. I am doing _science_ , I am not -" and here he calls on his most utterly irritatingly patrician manner, with a little snap of frost in every syllable, " _injecting_ things." And then, after a pause, thawing out: "I'm not going to kill myself, John. I'm really not."  
  
This is better. John looks so relieved. That may actually have been the right thing to say.  
  
"You've - got that wrong," John mumbles. He reaches out, and Sherlock, startled, holds still, wondering if the inspection has suddenly resumed. But it is because he's misbuttoned one of his cuffs, trying to do it up while not looking. John puts it right and then lets go very suddenly. "Right. Just. Be careful with the bloody belladonna will you."  
  
***  
Mrs Hudson is disappointed. She had someone really promising coming to look at 221C yesterday and of course, that was the day Sherlock was doing some experiment upstairs that smelled horrible, and it scared away the potential tenant. Emma could really use the money the rent for C would bring in, Christmas is - well, a month or two away, but it's going to be here _any second_ , at the rate time passes when you're getting old. Not fair, not fair. But - well. If one were thinking about what's fair, how fair would it have been on that young woman to live downstairs, even one floor removed, from all the goings on up there? The horrible smell had been honest, really. It's just the sort of thing that Sherlock does and always will. Like the fighting. And the violin.  
  
But he hasn't played in ages, has he. She can always hear it down here when he does. And he hasn't. Not in ages.  
  
Emma decides she doesn't need much excuse to go up and just see how things are. They're both in. It's a decent hour. She brings a box of light bulbs, that's more than plausible enough. It's a challenge, though, actually getting up the stairs. Her hip is bad today. If she'd realised how bad she might not have come up. But she's halfway up by then, and no way to go but on.  
  
"Hoo hoo," breathless, and a little knock.  
  
John is at the desk with his computer, frowning a little when she comes in, but he looks up at her with a smile, a warmer smile than he's been able to produce lately, oh that's good. They must have made up whatever they were fighting about. And Sherlock hasn't been down to smoke with her in weeks, which in turn has let her cut down, since she can't blame her little slipups on him.  
  
Sherlock, now, he is crouching at the end of the couch like a sort of vulture, reading a book at a speed that is just indecent. He glances up at her while turning a page, back down to scanning the next one, and says, "Look John. It's the charge of the light bulb brigade."  
  
And John laughs! Emma beams at them. They _have_ made up. Oh, maybe that awful smelling experiment was just Sherlock's way of asking for attention. That wouldn't surprise her at all.  
  
"Just thought I'd see if I could shed a little light on the subjects," she says, joining in, and she does not get a laugh, but John smiles at her again. "If you need any upstairs, John, I'll let you take care of it, but any down here...?" And as she swivels to survey the lamps in the room and determine if the ones that are off are off by choice, a pain stabs through her hip and down her leg into her foot and she bites her lip with a little gasp. Oh it hurts. HURTS. But she is used to hiding how much.  
  
Sherlock's head pops up from his book and he stares at her.  
  
John has not noticed the sound Emma made, but Sherlock's reaction gets his attention all right, and he too turns to stare at her.  
  
"Mrs Hudson? Are you all right?"  
  
"Oh - yes - really - " but then John is there next to her, arm around her, helping her sit down in the nearest chair, sure and gentle. Doctor, he's a doctor, she forgets that sometimes, but she thinks he must be a good one. He's reassuring. And doesn't he smell nice! She blinks. Pain is receding a bit as she breathes deeply and when he leans in, hand resting on the chair back, to look anxiously into her face, she smiles and pats his cheek.  
  
"I'm fine. I'm fine. Please. Really. I just - stepped - wrong. I'll have a little sit down for a minute and I'll be absolutely fine."  
  
John takes the light bulbs and goes around himself to every lamp, seeing which are burned out, replacing and moving on. Sherlock's eyes are back on his book, but he has stopped turning the pages.  
  
His attention is on her, she can just tell. He's listening to her. At her. She knows how he is, how he reads every little detail, so she works intently on bringing her breathing down to normal speed. Her heartbeat slows down, the pain eases off.  
  
And slowly he starts to turn the pages again.  
  
John comes pounding down the staircase from his room. "Thanks, Mrs Hudson. We did need a few. I hadn't noticed." He looks her over, seems pleased. "Feeling better?"  
  
"Oh yes," and she is just starting to press her palms against the armrests of the chair to lever herself out of it when Sherlock says, _"Don't get up,"_ in the sort of sharp urgent tone that could mean there was a wasp just next to you, or a laser sight wavering on somebody's head, or just that you were in danger of interrupting his train of thought. His deep voice, sharp with authority, is something you just obey. And she trusts him. She obeys it now.  
  
Sherlock goes on, "John wants to make you some tea."  
  
John turns and looks at him for just a moment, and Emma wants to laugh a little, poor John, Sherlock is just so rude and childish the way he asks for things even when he's being nice, but John shrugs, and moves on cheerfully to the kitchen. "That's right, Mrs Hudson, and we're not taking no for an answer."


	4. Chapter 4

Two nights later, John lay trying to sleep, knowing he needed to, it was horribly late, but knowing also that he couldn't sleep while his thoughts were still churning like this. It wasn't anything he could make himself feel better by typing, either. It just wasn't. Some things he couldn't even let himself think in his own head. As though anyone could overhear. But even if he typed something out and then deleted it at once, there was... there were things like keylogger software. Paranoia. But there it was. If he couldn't think a thing inside the enclosed space of his own head then he couldn't spin it out into words. Well - not sober, and he had no intention or need of ever getting that drunk again - he hoped.   
  
Oh what must he have said to Mrs Hudson, back then... she was so good, she never made any reference to it, she was tactful about the time of Sherlock's absence even when babbling along in friendly chatter. And the violin. She had protected the violin. John had always liked her for the way she humanised Sherlock, but when he saw her bring out the violin without a single word of why she had it, he loved her on his own behalf.  
  
He hardly ever played it, though. Not anymore. Not lately.   
  
There had been an especially low point during the bad time, when John was obsessed with that violin. The thing itself, which he could not find anywhere despite hunting high and low and even questioning Mycroft about it, certain he must have taken it for the Holmes family. Mycroft - John could not even remember now what exactly Mycroft had said, but that hadn't been the point, it had been the soothing tone that got through, and John did believe him after a bit, that Mycroft didn't have it, nor their mother.   
  
Mrs Hudson even helped him look for it once, he remembered vaguely. When he was pissed. She knew where it was so she helped him look in other places.   
  
She was right. He'd wanted to see it again, to touch it, but he would have destroyed it within minutes. It was a thing that should be treasured, _used_ , not consumed in a pointless act of rage and guilt. It was not as though he would ever have learned to play it, and would have felt like a fraud if he had, wouldn't have felt worthy to use it.   
  
He'd only ever taken clarinet at school because he'd had a crush on the pretty music teacher, and that was the instrument she'd urged on him.  She left after only a year, and so had John's interest in music.  
  
During the bad time, the time of hunting the violin, he'd been tormented by a melody running through his head that would not stop or give way to anything else. It was the song Sherlock had been composing for Irene Adler when he thought she was dead: he'd abandoned it completely on the day she came back. Later John had seen the music sheets in the wastepaper basket. At the time, sick with jealousy of Sherlock's fixation on her, he had told himself that if Sherlock wanted to throw something away that was his business. Later of course... after the fall... he had been furious with himself for not saving those pages, rescuing them from oblivion. They were not saved. They were gone.  
  
But the melody, which Sherlock had played over and over as he wrote it, remained in John's head, sad throbbing notes, swelling and swirling round and round, and when he was at his most drunk John felt sure that smashing the violin would definitely shut up that music in his head that was driving him mad.   
  
The gigantic fucking irony of it, of course, was that it was already a dirge for someone who it turned out wasn't actually dead, and there it went again. Sherlock had never named the song, or if he had a name in mind he hadn't written it on the music sheets. What might he have called it? 'Don't Rest In Peace Because You're Not Dead You Great Bloody Faker' might not sound pretty, but it really nailed it otherwise.   
  
So tired. Could not sleep.   
  
He should - He needed to - but he didn't want to, he couldn't control his thoughts anymore when it came to that and he didn't - _want_ to. The guilt made it hardly worth any other benefit.   
  
But his body was desperate and didn't care about guilt. It was not concerned with the content of his thoughts. It just needed to get off. Really badly.   
  
He knew it was inevitable but he still fought it for a while. He'd pushed back the covers, shoved shirt up and pyjama bottoms down and had hold of himself and he was doggedly trying, trying to think about a woman. Any woman.   
  
Not Sarah though.  
  
A flicker of interest at the memory of the music teacher - Miss Hill? or was it Hall? - but he'd still been a child when he knew her and she was a hazy memory at best.   
  
Jeanette, now. She'd been so angry with him, and rightly so, but while they were dating they'd had a nice time or two for all that, that one time, yes, that _was_ nice. She'd been the most adventurous girl John ever went to bed with. They'd done _two_ things he had always wanted to try (one of them secretly) and never thought he would - and those in the same night.   
  
Oh yes, these were good thoughts, ones with real heat, and John could enjoy remembering - the feel of her skin - the little noises she made when he was really pleasing her - and he'd liked the scent she wore, she didn't reek of it, you had to push against her and breathe it in to really appreciate it. The way she looked back at him, hot taunting smile as she swung her hair out of her eyes. And Jesus, the feel of her tongue -   
  
Working, it was working, it was good, she was good, just the echo of her would be enough and God how tight and her scent and the sounds she made and her tongue  -  
  
He was almost there, almost there, but _shit!_ it was just not... _enough_... John was getting caught in a loop because there were so few memories really and they lost their power and if only Sherlock hadn't -   
  
Oh God no - _fuck_ \- No.  
  
Not again. But - but _Christ_ he'd tried. He'd really - He tried to get Jeanette back into the front of his mind, but she was gone. And in her place...  
  
This wasn't a memory now, it was a fantasy, but an ever changing one with terrible power to disperse only to reappear in another form.   
  
The things he did with Jeanette that night, the special memorable things, were things you could do with a man. John hadn't thought about that directly, but he had time to contemplate it now. Eyes tight shut, he struggled on the bed with it as though it were a nightmare. In his hand his cock pulsed, fiercely hard now and leaking fluid onto his fingers as he stroked it.  
  
Sherlock. Pinning him down. Or else pinned underneath him. Crying out _John_ , the look on his face all surprised, all blurred with pleasure. Blurred because - John did not know what that would look like?   
  
But the merest thought of it pushed him so close to coming that he actually slowed down. Panting. Biting his lips.   
  
Another fantasy. An older one. One that came back a lot. Somewhere out in the city at night. Running. Laughing in an alley, getting their breath back. And then the laughter winding down and a _look_ passing between them.   
  
The fantasy had once gone the other way round. Once it had been Sherlock telling John what to do. But somehow it became inverted and so when the look passed between them now, in John's mind, he was the one who pushed Sherlock back against a wall and shoved into his mouth with a hard kiss. And it was Sherlock who stood helpless, heart pounding, instantly aroused and unable to deny it because they were pressed up together and it could be felt. Both of them could. It was a fantasy. Nothing was hidden.   
  
Flick, a jump cut, forward in fictional time. His own back against the wall. Sherlock getting down on his knees, fumbling John's trousers open. _Yes Jesus yes, do it, suck me, suck my cock_ , and John's hand tightened now on himself. _Give you something to do with that mouth_ , he shocked himself just a little with that and it made him throb hard against his palm as he imagined Sherlock bending his head down, opening for it, unskilled but eager. _Beautiful. Suck. Me._ John's fingers pushing into and tightening in his dark hair, what did it feel like, must be silky and soft and in his mind he pulled it hard. _Fuck your beautiful mouth_ , and shoved Sherlock down on him, _Take it_ \- and that was that.   
  
Normally, he was absolutely quiet at times like these - times by himself, anyway. It was a thing you learned to do in the army when you had to, others might have known what you were doing, but if you didn't want to be misunderstood you tried to be as polite as possible about it. This time a sound escaped John's gritted teeth, a low cry, as climax grabbed him by the spine and bent him backwards, arching up off the bed.   
  
_Sherlock_.   
  
Then as he rocked back again, gasping for breath,   
  
_I'm sorry I'm so sorry._  
  
***  
Downstairs, Sherlock stumbles into the bathroom. He turns the light on out of habit, then recoils in pain as his enlarged pupils are struck by the blaze of illumination and cannot contract. Feeling for the switch, eyes tightly closed, he turns the light off again and has to stand with his hands over his face for almost a full minute.  
  
 _John_.  
  
While listening to John mutter to himself, he had heard his own voice: John somehow speaking in Sherlock's voice saying his own name, that makes no sense -  
  
and oh yes, just when he thought the 'Holy Ghost' was Jeanette or Sarah or maybe the one with the spots - then John said his name. Sherlock.   
  
He had thought it had to be one of those, who but a woman has a beautiful mouth? But it is Sherlock and - John thinks he is beautiful. He said it -   
  
But it's absurd, and _how_ did - ?  
  
Thankfully Mrs Hudson is asleep downstairs, quiet but for little murmurs, no distracting patter from her direction. But upstairs, John is not asleep. He is whispering, 'I'm sorry.' Over and over and over.   
  
Sherlock cautiously moves his fingers, testing his eyes against the darkened bathroom. Now he can move. He can actually see in here, a bit, and needn't have put the light on at all.   
  
He doesn't need the light, but he needs the water. He's - Dirty.  
  
Is that the right word?  
  
The effects of the belladonna on the more superfluous parts of his body are clearly getting worse. It - caused him to ejaculate this time. For an agonising instant it had felt so good and - but - That's - horrible, no better than incontinence, and his _clothes_...!   
  
He strips out of them, shuddering, and runs the shower, getting in even before the water is hot enough for his liking. Sherlock feels guilty, as though he is washing away evidence. He feels as though he has found another file written by John, different from the angry ones he keeps hiding in the taxes folder, that says 'I have sexual fantasies about you'.  
  
And as a postscript, 'I'm sorry'.  
  
He stands under the water and lets it beat down on his bowed head.   
  
_John_. In Sherlock's own voice. He'd _heard_ it. _How_ had he heard it.   
  
How could John mutter to himself in a different voice? He doesn't have a talent for mimicry, he's even a terrible liar, it makes no sense.   
  
But Sherlock heard it, is sure of it, his preparation (as he is now euphemistically thinking of the orchid tincture and belladonna solution regime) causes mild visual hallucinations even at what seems the optimal dose, but not _auditory_ ones. And it wasn't some recording. And it wasn't someone else. And it wasn't himself, speaking aloud.  
  
Whatever remains must be the truth... but... where is the line between impossible and improbable? The only thing that seems to fit is well beyond improbable, a childish and absurd idea. There _must_ be some other answer he's not seeing - the sort of answer he'd need John to help him find - just when he can't ask, of course.  
  
There must be some other answer than that what Sherlock heard wasn't _muttering_ at all. There must be some other answer than that.  
  
Fact: John _doesn't_ mutter to himself.   
  
Sherlock turns off the water and stands there, dripping, in the dark bathroom.   
  
He really doesn't. John _doesn't_ mutter to himself, he talks to other people or else he is quiet, he can be quiet for impressively long spaces of time and even up in his room at night he doesn't mutter. He does the equivalent when he types out angry things and hides them, but the point of them is that he doesn't say them aloud. Mrs Hudson doesn't mutter under her breath either, she too reserves her speech for human company when she wields chatter like a Gatling gun.  
  
They _don't_ mutter to themselves, therefore Sherlock is hearing... something that isn't that.   
  
His own voice, while John was... fantasising... about him.  
  
John's voice saying things he would never say aloud, that it's _unimaginable_ he would say aloud, even in privacy, that's just not John -  
  
 _but do you know John like you thought you did?_  
  
Obviously... not... but - but his own voice, what else did he hear but his own voice _in John's head?_  
  
***  
The water went on downstairs and John looked at the bedside clock. Late for a shower, by most people's standards, but Sherlock did what he did for whatever reason he had. Another of his late nights. John, sleepy now in the wake of satisfaction however sparse and guilty, cleaned himself up and lay back down and listened to the high pitched squeal from the water pipes going on and on. His thoughts seemed emptied out of everything, after the brief storm of remorse; he felt empty and stupid, but in a comfortable way.  
  
He was drifting. Floating. River. Dark water but so much less cold than it appeared...  
  
There was a loud crash from downstairs.   
  
John jerked awake and was on his feet beside the bed before his consciousness caught up to him. Panic. Downstairs. Something fell?, door kicked in?, Sherlock hurt - ?   
  
Even as he flew down the stairs, barefoot, he was wishing he'd grabbed his gun because what if it was an intruder? but he had no more time, he was looking for Sherlock and he'd fight bare handed if some bastard was invading their territory to hurt -  
  
"Sherlock!" John shouted, pivoting where he stood, heart pounding: did not see him anywhere, not in the bedroom, and the bathroom was dark so he did not think at first to look in there. But when he did look, fumbling for the light, he found Sherlock lying on the floor, wet and dazed and naked except for a towel. Cringing and covering his eyes.   
  
_"Turn that light off!!"_  
  
"What the hell? Are you all -- "  
  
 _"Light off! Turn it off!"_  
  
"Jesus," and John complied, confused but responding to Sherlock's urgency. "What happened, why are you showering in the dark, are you hurt," overlapped with Sherlock saying, "I'm fine! Get out."  
  
John retreated, unhappy, towards the living room, but still had questions. "What happened? Did you fall?" and he was past this question onto the next one before it could register, what it sounded like, _did you fall_ , "Are you hurt?"  
  
"It's nothing! I _slipped_. I'm not hurt. I'm doing an experiment."  
  
"In the shower? In the dark?"  
  
Sherlock emerged in his dressing gown. Usually he looked flawless at such times, freshly shaved and perfectly groomed, but he didn't look that way now, with a day's worth of stubble and a bruise forming on his temple.   
  
And his enormous, _gigantic_ pupils, all but eclipsing the pale ice of his irises. No wonder he'd recoiled from the light.  
  
"What's the matter with your _eyes_?" Panic returned to stab John with a hot needle of real worry, that bruise on his head, could that be causing - ?   
  
"They were like that before I fell down. _John_. Stop panicking. I'm fine. It's fine. Go back to bed." Sherlock sat down on the sofa and pressed his palms together and John thought that he was trying to look bored, but the blown pupils just made him look like an owl.  
  
"Why are they like that? What, are you - _tripping_?"   
  
"If by that you mean some recreational - "  
  
"Yes, for fuck's sake, what are you killing yourself with now?"  
  
Sherlock was starting to deny that that was what he was doing, as John reached out to touch two fingers to Sherlock's near wrist, his right, to see how elevated his pulse must be.  
  
And he touched.  
  
***

  
John's warm fingers touch Sherlock's wrist.   
  
Sensation of time stopping. It happens when he is at his most fiercely focussed, solving a problem under pressure. The universe swings to a halt around the central point of his mind.   
  
But this time, the central point is not his mind. As impossible as that may sound. The central point is the exact place on his wrist where John touches him, feeling Sherlock's radial artery to measure his pulse. Listening with his fingertips to the rhythm of his heart.   
  
John leaning close, frowning and scolding and _snapping with righteous fury_ and _aching with worry_ and _vibrating with suppressed love_ and touching Sherlock's wrist and _remembering_ , right now, another time when he touched the same wrist and felt no pulse... 'oh clever you' he'd said when Sherlock explained about the ball. But as he _remembers_ it now there is an echo of a shock wave still going on, John's _horror_ and _grief_ and _pain_ at being used as a witness. After all this time. Even though Sherlock came back alive, even though it didn't really happen. John felt it, feels it as though it were real.   
  
Now John radiates _care_ and _worry_ and fierce, foolish, self-effacing _hunger_ , all these things cram and crowd themselves into Sherlock's awareness in that one moment - one heartbeat's worth, very fleeting at his current rate. More than enough time, at his current rate of thought speed.  
  
He is _feeling_ John's _feelings_.   
  
And if that is absurd then there it is, but that is what is happening, Sherlock has not experienced emotion in this way before, maybe not ever, certainly not since very young childhood. Not these emotions. Not like this. The feelings would be utterly alien, incomprehensible if this were not John. John, who provides context. John, whose feelings are focussed almost exclusively on Sherlock himself. And they are _strong_. Strong like Sherlock's thoughts are strong.   
  
They are _so strong._  
  
One beat of his pulse passes under John's touch. Sherlock's eyes flick to John's face, very close, three-quarters view, brows furrowed. John is staring straight into his eyes, at his pupils, obviously. John's eyes, Sherlock's pupils, John's fingers, Sherlock's wrist. Sherlock has arrived at a conclusion.  One pivot point passes to another and then time has to resume.  
  
"Jesus, your _pulse_ is - Sherlock? - um...?"  
  
Touch. Sherlock wants to touch, he _needs_ to touch, John. He leans forward, hooks an arm around John's waist and pulls. John is off balance, spine rigid in surprise. And _fear_ and _hope_ and _longing_ and _worry_ and so many things all at once, how can he feel so many things all at once?  
  
John lands on the sofa beside him, _shock_ and _bewilderment_ , and Sherlock is half on top of him, and he can distinctly feel a frisson of _fright/lust_ pass through John because he does not understand what Sherlock is doing, and Sherlock hardly understands it himself except that he is driven to do it. To _touch_ John. Not for sex, he wants - something else. Something... close perhaps, but... else.   
  
"What are you doing," John says quietly, as Sherlock pushes his face against John's chest and breathes in, and _feels._ He snuggles the not-bruised side of his face into the soft shirt and feels John's pulse under his head. And feels... a wave of _absolute helpless affection_ when his hand brushes against John's neck, skin to skin contact is much much stronger than through fabrics, and he pushes his hand into the neck of John's shirt.  
  
" _Sherlock_. What are you - seriously, what..."  
  
John doesn't want him to stop. His protests are even more feeble than they sound when you can feel _comfort longing hope_ with an exciting little hint of _fear_. Without speaking Sherlock prods John to lie back enough that Sherlock can lie on his side and rest his head on John's shoulder, one hand on John's neck.   
  
There's _arousal_ too, that he pretends not to notice for now. He pretends to fall asleep, to reassure John, to let John feel that the situation is safe and slightly normal, even though it isn't. Sherlock makes his breathing deep and even, so John will think he is sleeping, and just floats there in the most astonishing sense of well being he's ever known. John pulses with _protective delight_ , carefully putting his arms around Sherlock's back. _Confusion_ and _worry_ are also there and they bubble up from time to time, wavering through, but constant throughout is that _absolute helpless affection_ which, Sherlock realises, is something that belongs only to him in all the world.   
  
John holds him, carefully, and fights with _desire_ because of _loyalty_ and _fear of loss_. Sherlock tries to understand this, but there are no questions possible, that which he cannot understand he must wait to ponder later. He goes on pretending he is asleep. In a little while he will not have to pretend, the preparation will wear off and leave him exhausted. Before then he must take in as much as he can, learn as much as is possible.  
  
John's heart beats on, slow and steady under his cheek.  
  
***  
John was not fooled by Sherlock faking sleep.   
  
That, really, was the one thing he was sure about. Sherlock wasn't sleeping, but pretending to be. Why he was doing that wasn't so hard to guess, but why he was pretending to be asleep _on top of John_ was not as clear.   
  
Sherlock was _on_ something, had _taken_ something, that was clear; something that blew his pupils open, something that made him - touchy-feely. That was it, that was all there was to it. Sherlock was acid-tripping or on ecstasy or something, for some oh-not-at-all- _recreational_ reason, and was looking for comfort. A helper. What did you call it - a baby-sitter. If John had not come downstairs in a panic at the noise, Sherlock might have just ended up hugging his violin.   
  
But here they were. Lying down together on the sofa. Sherlock's weight was making John's leg fall asleep, but the rest of him was more than awake. Some bits more than others. Sherlock's head was heavy, and his wet hair had soaked through John's shirt to his skin. And his hand was _hot_ on John's neck, warping the neck of his shirt where it was shoved in. John couldn't really remember _ever_ being less comfortable.   
  
But he would not have moved now for anything... short of fire or some other serious threat. And even then - he really might have to think about it for a minute.   
  
The only real threat was that of Mrs Hudson barging in, but it was the middle of the night and there was no reason to suppose she had taken up sleepwalking on this night of all nights. They were as safe as they were likely to be. And they weren't... it wasn't as though they were doing anything. They were just -  
  
Sleeping together?  
  
But neither of them were asleep. John was very much afraid that the applicable verb was actually 'snuggling'. It certainly applied to what Sherlock was doing. John was just - the snuggle-ee. With a leg gone numb and his shirt all soaking wet.  
  
It took him a long time just to relax enough to put his arm somewhere comfortable, because that meant draping it across Sherlock's back, and even now John was afraid of doing something wrong, some unintended transgression. Even though he didn't start this. Even though he would never, never have dared such a thing himself. He felt guilty just because he was there, and because he wanted it and he was ashamed of wanting it. Even now!  
  
But eventually his arm was just ridiculously uncomfortable and he had no choice. He laid it across Sherlock's back, half expecting Sherlock at any moment to rear up, offended at being touched. But nothing happened. Even when John finally let his hand fully relax down onto the silk clad shoulder - nothing terrible happened to stop him. Sherlock nuzzled against him a little and then subsided. Still faking sleep.   
  
John lay there ignoring discomforts for an unknown length of time. His thoughts went blank, then he started to doze.   
  
Sherlock did fall asleep, eventually. It woke John to feel it - the body lying atop/against his relaxed all the way and the evenness of his breathing had become real. Deeper and slower.  
  
John looked down at the sleeping face half visible against his shoulder. Yes, Sherlock was asleep. He would never knowingly make a face like that if he knew someone were looking.   
  
Sherlock was asleep. Really asleep.  
  
John moved his other hand, agonisingly slowly, an inch at a time. And then at last he could reach.  
  
He touched Sherlock's hair.   
  
Oh.  
  
He'd wanted to do this. For a long time. For such a long time John had wanted so much to do this, just this. Soft dark curls, still just slightly damp, clinging to John's fingers as he stroked Sherlock's head. He pushed his fingers into Sherlock's hair, softly combing through. This was what it felt like to touch. This was what it felt like to have the _freedom_ to do this - even for just a little while.   
  
Sherlock sighed against him and moved his fingers slightly, uncoordinated, against John's neck.  
  
 _You like that_ , he thought in surprise.   
  
And then he remembered how just a little while earlier he'd been thinking of his hand in Sherlock's hair while he came -   
  
_oh God_. Shame, guilt, hot arousal, this was bad, if he could get out from under Sherlock right now and run away upstairs he would. But he couldn't. He let his hand fall away from that touch, he didn't deserve to enjoy it.  
  
"Why did you stop...?" The sleepy slow voice against his shoulder made John jump like a caught shoplifter.   
  
_I thought you were sleeping!_  
  
"Don't, don't stop." Sherlock bumped his head demandingly against John.   
  
Slowly John moved his hand to comply and wondered how any of this came to happen. He touched Sherlock's hair again, stroked it, pushed his fingers in. With permission. At insistence, as a matter of fact. It helped a little, to have permission.   
  
Sherlock rested his head back down with a little huff of breath as though to say, ' _Finally_ my will is being done'. His breath warmed John's skin right through his clothes.  
  
Eventually he could not ignore his numb leg any longer, and he had to shove at Sherlock to get him to move. Sherlock, sleepy and protesting, let John out from under him and lay back down on the sofa watching John trying to work the feeling back into his leg by walking around - not jumping, out of consideration for Mrs Hudson below.   
  
John turned back toward the sofa, once the worst of the tingling of returning circulation had passed, and felt a pulse of sorrow at having gotten up because now he could not go back.   
  
"I think I should go to bed now," he said, and he didn't want to, really, though he was tired and needed sleep. He didn't want to leave Sherlock... alone in this irresponsible condition, he told himself; after all, he fell down in the bathroom, and who knew...  
  
"But I need you."  
  
"I - " But what could he say in response to that? What could he possibly say? "The sofa is too small for two, Sherlock. You take it and I'll, I'll sleep in the chair, all right, I'll be near if you need anything -"  
  
Sherlock sat up and glared at John with his big mad dark eyes.   
  
"What?" said John.  
  
"I said I _need_ you. Stop panicking and come help me. If the sofa's too small for you, then the bed."  
  
 _The_ bed, not _my_ bed.  
  
"What exactly do - "  
  
Sherlock got up with an exasperated noise. He grasped John's wrist and pulled him toward the hallway, toward his room. John stumbled along behind him, "will you stop _pulling_ me?" but Sherlock didn't, and when they opened the door to the bedroom Sherlock stopped him when he reached for the light.   
  
Right. His eyes.   
  
They lay down on the bed, over the covers, and because it was almost dark (but not completely, with the door left ajar), it was easier to put his arm around Sherlock even though Sherlock was definitely awake.   
  
"Is this what you wanted?" he asked, quietly.   
  
For answer, Sherlock bumped his head into John's chest. John laughed a little and stroked his hair. "You're like a cat."  
  
"Less _talk_."  
  
"Sorry."   
  
He was like a cat. John imagined Sherlock as a leopard, or a tiger, some cat large enough to stretch out like this, as tall as a man. The large cats didn't purr, he remembered reading that someplace, or catching it on the telly. And Sherlock didn't. But he came very close to it with a low, rumbling hum John could feel in his bones. "Hmmmmm, mmmmm."  
  
"Sherlock."   
  
"Hmmmmm mmm."  
  
" _Sherlock_. What did you take, what are you on?"  
  
Grumpy noise. "It isn't anything illegal."  
  
"That is _not_ what I asked you. What are you _on_?"  
  
"Flowers."  
  
"Flow - what - the bloody _orchids_? Is that what they're for?"  
  
"You're stopping again. Stop _stopping_."  
  
John growled a little, but resumed petting.   
  
"Is this an experiment you're doing on yourself, or - "  
  
"I don't want to _talk_. I want to _feel_ ," and Sherlock pushed his hand up under John's t-shirt to touch his skin. Warm hand, long fingers spread out on John's side just under his ribs.  
  
John shuddered. _This is not fair._


	5. Chapter 5

When John has finally shut up Sherlock breathes out, a long exhale, then breathes in again, John's scent surrounding him, John's hand stroking his head. And he breathes in through the touch, John and his feelings and the things he wants to do.  
  
This, right here, is one of them. John takes pleasure in touching Sherlock's hair, almost as much as Sherlock feels in being touched. It feels splendid, makes his scalp tingle. Like John is caressing his _brain_ , though even Sherlock knows John wouldn't like _that_ image.  
  
It is pleasurable. But he'd like a little something more. He'd like to push John just a little more. The feelings that radiate from him are intoxicating when they are the right ones. Touching John under his shirt is one such example. Sherlock drags his fingers up an inch or two and breathes in the helpless desire that springs up all over John, practically broadcasting _want_ and _worry_.  
  
 _Sherlock_ , John thinks, but prevents himself from saying out loud. Sherlock can hear it anyway.  
  
Sherlock pulls away to grapple John's t-shirt off him. It's damp from Sherlock's hair. He tosses it away. John wants to protest but bites his tongue and says nothing. He is shivering a little, though, when Sherlock lies back down on him.  
  
Now there is lots of skin contact and Sherlock rubs his cheek against John's chest, hand resting on his belly, and John is still shivering and pouring _absolute helpless love_ into Sherlock's expanded senses. He doesn't need those senses to know John is aroused, his breathing and pulse are more than enough, but those senses are explaining a lot of things to Sherlock that he hadn't known for himself. What _longing_ and _heat_ can really feel like. And how much self denial John is capable of.  
  
But John can't stand that forever, and Sherlock is beginning to want to know what it feels like when pure _longing_ turns into something else. He isn't sure how to make that happen, though. He lacks experience.  
  
He will need to do some research in the very near future. Not just now though. The internet is a difficult thing to use with dilated pupils. It will have to wait, but it would in any case - he would not let John up now for all the data in the world.  
  
Sherlock tilts up his head to rest his face against John's neck. Carotid pulse under his lips. Rapid, rapid, rapid. John is running a race lying here under him.  
  
John is thinking, _oh God oh God_ , in a tedious loop. Sherlock bites him a little just to make it stop.  
  
John jumps. "Ah! _Sherlock_."  
  
"What now," mumbling against John's neck, which opens his mouth and lets his tongue slip out to taste. His fingertips have discovered John's navel, which is interesting.  
  
"You'd better stop. I mean it. You're not... in control of yourself."  
  
He's feeling John's pulse with his tongue, but he has to stop to talk. "Yes I am - "  
  
"How can you be, look where we are, you're all _lit up_ on your stupid _orchids_ and you'll be horrified tomorrow," _and blame me, and drive me out or leave me again -_  
  
"John. I'm not intoxicated. I know perfectly well what I'm doing."  
  
"And what _are_ you doing?" John's hand covers Sherlock's on his belly and stops it wandering.  
  
"Feeling you." Obviously.  
  
John laughs a little at that. There are so many things going on in him, how _does_ he sort it out? Even  John gets overwhelmed, but not most of the time.  
  
But he doesn't even understand what Sherlock means by feeling. This is not a sign of stupidity and is only the most natural sort of ignorance because Sherlock didn't know what it could mean either. Until John touched him.  
  
"Problem?" Sherlock asks.  
  
John's answer is _very_ tedious, but... to be expected. "I am _not gay_ ," he says plaintively.  
  
"Nobody _cares_ ," Sherlock snaps, and oh how he has always wanted to say that. "I'm not - _anything_. So _what_? I like touching you. _You_ like it. - You think about me when you're alone. I know. It's fine."  
  
 _Fear_. "What."  
  
Sherlock doesn't like this fear, or at least not in this amount. It's too much. It's not comfortable at all. John has gone tense under him too.  
  
"You're not here _reluctantly_ , are you? Obviously exceptions can be made to orientation. Or lack thereof. I said it's _fine_."  
  
"What do you _mean_ you 'know'?"  
  
Sherlock realises that of course, he usually says he doesn't _know_ , he _notices_.  
  
"You did it this evening," he says. This is _not_ an answer to John's question but is a perfectly effective derail. John pushes at him and tries to get up. _Fear_ and _shame_ and _anger_ are almost sickening in combination, at such strength. Sherlock wishes he had known that before provoking them all at once.  
  
He grasps John by the arm. "Don't leave me."  
  
Because that is what John wants to do now, to run away to the ends of the earth and hide from this. He cannot be allowed to do that. Sherlock did without him long enough and any further separation was already unthinkable. So much more so now, now he can _feel_. This has to be dealt with now, enough to keep John here.  
  
Whatever it takes to keep John is what Sherlock is willing to do.  
  
John's _desire to flee_ is as strong as anything else he feels and Sherlock wraps his arms around John's waist, anchoring him to the bed. "Don't leave me. Please, John."  
  
 _Mystified surprise_. As though John doesn't know how Sherlock feels about him, as though John doesn't know he couldn't bear to do without him. Even John is never that stupid! But the sensation of _reluctant pleasure_ makes Sherlock wonder if John really _doesn't_ know those things. Can it be possible? After all he did, all he went through to save John - and yes, even after all he himself put John through, because he had known it would cause John pain, but had to do it knowing that. After all that, can John doubt him, truly?  
  
"I won't - leave you. Christ, let go and let me _think_ ," moans John, and Sherlock unwinds his arms, but cautiously, in case John is capable of concealing a sudden urge to bolt.  
  
He isn't. He doesn't, at any rate. John collapses down to sit on the edge of Sherlock's bed. On the side near the open door, within easy reach of escape.  
  
But he doesn't go. He sits, breathing raggedly, and now the feelings emanating from him are so confused and overwhelming that Sherlock doesn't need to touch him to be able to feel it. He doesn't want to feel it any better than he does already. It is painful.  
  
There are things, suggestions Sherlock would be blurting out right about now, that he only knows not to say because John's feelings are so tangled and intense that they overlap Sherlock on the bed. He _would_ be saying practical, reassuring things like - how he would never tell anyone or let John look bad and how Sherlock didn't want to get married or have any sort of 'lifestyle' except exactly what they have, plus sleeping together in his room. And how they need not do anything whatsoever else if John did not want it, or (given that he knew this was the truth, a safer bet) if John _did_ want it, Sherlock would be willing to learn how to do the things with his mouth that he understood would please John. He really doesn't mind, he can say - but not right now, it seems.  
  
John turns back to face Sherlock. Suddenly John's roiling cloud of emotions has solidified and he is no longer flustered. He says, quiet but firm, "I will stay here tonight with you, IF, and only IF, you behave yourself, and no unnecessary _feeling_." Sherlock knows John means no unnecessary feeling with his hands, but it still feels like a rejection. John reaches out, feeling for Sherlock's hand. and touches it. He doesn't take it, but he touches it. _Honesty_ in John's touch now. And _resolution_.  
  
"All right. I take your point about - exceptions. And maybe you're right - but - I can't trust the state you're in, Sherlock. Your pupils are bigger than the wide world and you've never acted like this before and I'm just so tired I can't think. I'll sleep here if you want me to but - let me sleep. Please?"  
  
"Yes," says Sherlock at once. Honestly, there would be nothing else he could say. Whatever his intentions.  
  
He moves back to let John have the side nearest the door, a gesture. Doing so loses even that little touch of hands, and that is disappointing, but John said he would stay.  
  
John pulls back the blankets on his side, obliging Sherlock to get up and do the same. Sherlock casually unties the belt of his dressing gown and hangs it up before lying down and pulling up the covers. John can't see in the dark as well as he can right now, but it should be obvious enough what he's doing.  
  
"Just sleep," he repeats the promise, then resumes his former position against John's side and bumps his head into John's shoulder looking for the most comfortable place. John misinterprets this as a demand for more petting and stroking of his hair, and Sherlock falls asleep, in the end, to this feeling, the slow rhythm of this caressing of his head.  
  
***  
Mrs Hudson is waiting till she hears the water in use upstairs. It has to be John, he's always up early, but then the shower doesn't come on. Funny, they are so set in their ways up there all the time, except when you assume they are, and then they're not.  
  
The potential tenant has agreed to come back after an explanation of what caused the _very temporary_ smell that drove her away last time, and she could only come very early in the morning, so Emma needs to go up and beg those boys to behave themselves for twenty minutes this morning. She needs the income from that tenant and she just knows instinctively that this is the only _decent_ tenant she's going to find for that horrid hole in the ground.  
  
It's John she needs to tell, anyway. He's the responsible one, most of the time. All of the time lately. She listens upstairs... all is quiet again.  
  
They can't possibly both be asleep at this hour? Someone must be awake. She looks at the clock, feeling more and more impatient as the time for the appointment creeps closer and there are still no signs of life upstairs. It will be _just like them_ to... to have some demolitions experiment about to go off, or some noisy row, or - or the violin at top volume just as her second chance at a decent Christmas is walking up from the tube stop.  
  
She climbs the stairs very carefully, making sure not to aggravate her hip, which is not so bad today, all things considered. Opening the door she peers into the sitting room. The only lights on in here are very dim, the switches pulled almost all the way down to off. Rather moody lighting for a sitting room, even with dawn light creeping in the windows. All those orchids everywhere. But no one in the chairs or the sofa.  
  
She looks down the hall. She can see the master bedroom door ajar. She looks at the stairway going up to the second bedroom. The door up there is wide open.  
  
Both of them must be asleep. Really, she's come up here for nothing. She's hardly going to go knocking on their bedroom doors, if they're asleep then so much the better, that young woman is going to be downstairs any minute.  
  
But now she feels like a creeper, to come in like this, so perhaps she had better leave a note. There ought to be something handy for detectives to write things down on, oughtn't there? Finally finding a sheet of paper and something to scribble with, she leans against the desk to write PLEASE BE QUIET, TENANT COMING ROUND but she never gets to write more than PLE because the desk creaks loudly under her weight and it scares her and she gasps a little, straightening up.  
  
From the room down the hall is a noise, a commotion, but not the sort she was trying to prevent, more a sort of reacting to her noise sort of noise. The door bangs against the wall as someone comes through.  
  
It's John. He's wide eyed, responding to the intrusion, but stops short when he sees Emma standing there at the desk. He doesn't have a gun but he looks as though he does, the way he stands, defending territory. His shirt is off and his hair is a little rumpled, he's just in pyjama bottoms. She shouldn't look, really, but he does look nice.  
  
And - he just came out of Sherlock's room.  
  
"Mrs Hudson?" John is staring at her in confusion, "what's the matter? Do you need - "  
  
"Oh no, sorry, I'd thought you were up and I only came up to ask - "  
  
Behind John, down the hall, Sherlock emerges from the bedroom. He moves toward the bathroom like he's sleepwalking, eyes barely open and _oh sweet angels of mercy_ he is stark naked.  
  
Her voice stops short and it must be the look on her face that makes John turn to look behind him.  
  
When he turns back, he has gone so red so fast that it's like someone has turned a red spotlight on him. Behind him Sherlock finally reaches the bathroom and disappears from her horrified, fascinated view.  
  
 _My goodness._  
  
She's having a hard time keeping a smile off her face. Emma knows she mustn't, she really mustn't smile, John is so embarrassed, poor dear, and he mustn't think she is laughing at him, because she really isn't. She's just so _pleased_. But she can't say that either, not now.  
  
"What was it you _wanted_ Mrs Hudson." John has shut his eyes and is trying to stay polite but his teeth are gritted so even a question sounds like a statement.  
  
"I've - just - got that new potential tenant back to look at the basement this morning, so - please be good for an hour - that's all." Her hands get away from her, fluttering. "Not that you're not. I mean, noise or experiments or things, blowing out the fuse-box, _anything_ \- just please - don't. Let me get the lease signed. Please."  
  
John has opened his eyes and focussed on her again, now giving her a mostly sincere smile. Mostly, because he's still so embarrassed. "Right. We'll do our best."  
  
As she goes back down the stairs to wait, Emma can let herself smile now. Well - finally! _Something_ is going right upstairs. Good for John. Good for both of them.  
  
 _Goodness. That's what Sherlock looks like out of his clothes...?_  
  
 _Oh John you lucky boy!_  
  
She giggles a bit, stirring her tea at the kitchen table.  
  
  
  
***  
Well, _that_ was something of a variation on how John had assumed it might go, Mrs Hudson's inevitable barging-in. She took care of it early, you had to give her that. In ways it was better than her finding them on the sofa like he'd thought last night (or was that very very early this morning), and in ways it was of course much, much worse. Sherlock sleeps naked, it's nothing to do with sex, he knows that, but Sherlock usually does _not_ walk around starkers, he shrouds himself in a sheet or puts his bloody dressing gown on, he _doesn't_ walk out naked when Mrs Hudson's voice is clear to be heard.  
  
 _Did he do it on purpose? He must have done._  
  
John rubbed one hand over his face, trying to clear his head, but there was no chance of that. Too much in it. Too much to deal with.  
  
At least she hadn't been upset, or disapproving. She'd barely been able to keep the smile off her face, but at least she tried.  
  
Coffee. There needed to be coffee. A practical task to deal with. And then caffeine. Water. Filter. Coffee. Go. John sighed.  
  
"What did Mrs Hudson want."  
  
John turned to look, though he should have known better, he really should. Of course Sherlock was still naked. He smelled of toothpaste. His eyes were not even at half mast - maybe a third. John couldn't see his pupils through the drooping dark lashes.  
  
He turned away again. Mrs Hudson had felt the freedom to have a good long stare, obviously, but somehow John didn't feel - allowed to. He just didn't.  
  
"Could you put something _on_ please?"  
  
"Why bother, I'm going back to bed. What did she want."  
  
"For _you_ to behave till she gets the new tenant signed. No horrible smells or explosions or anything." She'd acted like it was the pair of them that did these things, when except for fighting, John was never involved in any of these transgressions.  
  
Unless she thought they were going to be having noisy sex at half five in the morning. Or at any time. Oh God. Was this going to keep happening, every other thought going to his face in a helpless blush?  
  
"I'll be sleeping, she should be safe." Sherlock paused. "Are you coming back?"  
  
"To bed?" Blush again. "I - No. I'm up. I was making coffee," by way of explanation.  
  
"You have it. Bed now," and Sherlock wandered back down the hall to the bedroom.  
  
Well. That didn't answer any questions at all for John. 'Are you coming back'? meant that Sherlock definitely remembered John having slept in his bed with him. And was inclined for that to continue. But the rest of it, John didn't have any idea.  
  
 _You think about me when you're alone. I know._  
  
 _It's fine._  
  
How did he know? How was it fine? How could it possibly be fine...  
  
 _You did it this evening._  
  
God, how did he _know_?  
  
John could accept that Sherlock had some way of observing when he'd done something, even wanking, though he'd never mentioned it before, but what he thought about? He never, never, never said anything aloud, wrote anything, told anyone, _ever_ ; was it just one of Sherlock's infernally good guesses, then, and John instantly gave away the truth with his reaction?  
  
 _Yes. You're right. I do think about you, not only do I get off thinking about you, I can't get off thinking about anybody else._  
  
From the bedroom Sherlock shouted, "John."  
  
"What?"  
  
"I want my computer."  
  
"Then come get it," John snapped, like on any other day, "you lazy shit."  
  
Sherlock did come get it, still magnificently naked and in no hurry to get out of John's sight. He looked pleased with himself. With the laptop tucked under one arm, he turned toward John. Sleepy eyed, hair profoundly rumpled from John touching it for hours on end, his skin so pale it added snowlight to the dimly lit sitting room, Sherlock smiled at him. Didn't say a word.  
  
Then he turned and sauntered back down to the bedroom, and John watched him go, staring in a way that would make Mrs Hudson very proud.  
  
She reappeared later, bearing freshly baked scones and the news that the new tenant would move in in two weeks and the lease was all signed and she was so looking forward to Christmas! John had trouble following her train of thought, but she was a good old soul and she restrained herself almost completely on the other topic. Almost. She didn't say anything about... that, but she kept looking back and forth between them.  
  
By then, Sherlock was showered, shaved and dressed and looked completely normal - like any other day. John, on the other hand, felt that he must look completely different. It had to be obvious to the naked eye: he had acknowledged himself a man capable of making an exception.  
  
How absurd he knew it was, too, which didn't make it any easier to take.  
  
The scones were delicious, though. John thanked her warmly for them, and when she'd gone he turned to Sherlock ruefully. "You gave her an eyeful this morning. I think she enjoyed it."  
  
Sherlock ignored this, as expected. He had his laptop open, eyes and fingers busy.  
  
John had gone out for the papers and was looking through them as usual, but the truth was that he was not taking in a word of what his eyes passed over. Even the pictures were vague and meaningless. All he could think about was last night, on the sofa, and then on the bed, and he wondered how far Sherlock would have gone if John had not stopped him.  
  
He wondered that a lot.  
  
But he had to do better than this, he really had to, and he forced himself to go back to the beginning, the front of the pile of papers, and started again, taking note at least of what sort of things were happening. Road congestion. Burglaries. Not so many murders just lately. Demonstrations.  
  
"John."  
  
"What," turning to the next paper, paging past bombings half a world away, seeking out London first and then the rest of the country. Scandal... Disappearance... Vandalism... Embezzlement...  
  
"Do you prefer fellatio, or irrumatio?"  
  
For an instant John actually thought Sherlock was talking about music, that he had just said music words in Italian, and then his mind screeched to a halt and he looked up at Sherlock, completely dumbfounded, blinking. Sherlock just said the word 'fellatio', was this a sign of the apocalypse? And John didn't even know the other word, though it would obviously come in handy in a limerick.  
  
Sherlock just looked at him steadily over the top of the screen of the computer in his lap, waiting for John to reply. He was - looking at something on the internet about _fellatio_?  
  
"I... don't... know that second word," John said slowly, his face hot and his palms sweating against the newsprint still in his hands. He put it down.  
  
"Fellation refers specifically to sucking the penis. Irrumation refers to thrusting the penis into the mouth." Sherlock frowned at the screen. "It's confusing, they're from opposite perspectives."  
  
"I didn't know there were different words," John said weakly.  
  
"I'm asking whether you would prefer I fellate your penis or if you would rather irrumate my mouth."  
  
"STOP, Jesus Christ, Sherlock - "  
  
"Or both? They don't seem to be mutually exclusive. Do you want to ejaculate in my m - "  
  
" _Aaaaargh_ ," John put his head down in his hands, his face was miserably hot again. This was not happening. They were not sitting in the sitting room, _talking_ about this.  
  
From across the room Sherlock said quietly, "Why is it so difficult to say what you want?"  
  
"What makes you think I want that," John said, muffled by his hands.  
  
"I don't think, I know. I know you do. Why not just - "  
  
"No! Please shut up, will you do that, please, for me, shut _up_."  
  
Sherlock huffed, slammed his laptop shut, and went to get his coat.  
  
***  
John didn't even try to stop Sherlock leaving, and Sherlock sulks about it as he walks. How can John pretend to be shy about something he habitually thinks about? What sense does that make? Perhaps he had felt he had to hide it before, but why now?  
  
He didn't believe Sherlock when Sherlock tried to tell him he was in control of himself and was making a lucid decision. Sherlock wishes now he'd broken his word about just sleeping. Now John is just more embarrassed than ever, but Sherlock still needs him for his experiment. Not to experiment on, but to help Sherlock experiment on himself.  
  
Sherlock walks around talking to himself - something he hasn't had to do in a while. He doesn't like it. People keep trying to answer him when he is not talking to them, he is talking to John, who just does not happen to be here. It's not so bad when he happens to be in motion, but one has to stand and wait for lights to change and people gather around one.  
  
"You are a _medical doctor_."  
  
"Sorry, what?"  
  
"Not _you_."  
  
It's cold. His scarf and gloves and coat don't seem to be enough.  
  
"Your _incomprehensible squeamishness_ would embarrass a pediatrician."  
  
"What are you babbling about?"  
  
"And you were in the army!"  
  
"Fuck off, looney."  
  
Sherlock sighs, his breath rising in steam. He looks for the nearest street signs, orienting himself in the map in his mind.  
  
Only now does it occur to him that he is doing something John always does. Withdrawing, mid argument, to go out and walk and walk (sometimes taking the tube to walk and walk somewhere else) until he feels like coming back. Sherlock knows this because he's followed John plenty of times.  
  
Is he doing what John does for the same reason that John does it?  
  
'Incomprehensible' isn't right, it's not accurate. John is not incomprehensible, his feelings are not unreachable. Sherlock's experiment on himself turns out to be about this: comprehension of John and further understanding. He has made himself able to understand, if only temporarily.  
  
So he is able to infer many things from what he remembers from last night, which is everything. (Although there is no denying the pleasure of mental exaltation, he was not lying to John when he said he was not intoxicated. He really wasn't.) John felt _shame_ and _fear_ all mixed together with _want_. Not with _all_ wanting. He didn't feel ashamed of _anything_ he did with or thought about women. When it came to _Sherlock_. Because Sherlock is a man.  
  
Well, he can't help that, and wouldn't waste a hypothetical wish on it either. He's _glad_ to be a man, if only for the clothes. He checks himself out in a shop window.  
  
"You shouldn't tell _me_ to shut up," he says to John in place of his reflection. " _You_ should shut up and stop being such a _baby_."  
  
"Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to move along please."  
  
He moves along, but only after a detailed analysis of the man's obvious fixation on his mother which prompts a threat to call the police. " _Call_ them," Sherlock says, loftily. "Ask for Detective Inspector Lestrade and tell him - "  
  
He imagines the look on John's face if he ends up in jail.  
  
"Oh, never _mind_."  
  
He walks to the kerb and hails a taxi. It's time to head back towards home anyway.  
  
'Home', how he had missed it, missed John of course, but the flat was like another person Sherlock knew, so familiar. It wasn't silent, but it didn't talk. It wasn't alive, but it wasn't empty.  
  
He ought to have understood from the way everything was still the same in the flat how much John had missed him. Some people might have expressed grief by trying to change everything, make it different so it wouldn't remind them of the missing - _deceased_ person. He must remember. John cannot retroactively reclassify his memories just because he learned they were wrong. The memories were already in him, Sherlock had put those memories there.  
  
It had been quite a diabolical piece of psychological manipulation, in fact, and it was the sort of thing Moriarty had deserved, not John, never John.  
  
 _Fine time to think of that now_ , says John in his head.  
  
"I still had no choice."  
  
"Sorry?" says the cabbie.  
  
"Not you."  
  
It was afternoon when he left the flat and it is full night when he returns to it.  
  
And John is furious.  
  
Sherlock hesitates on entering the flat. John is at the desk with his computer, and he looks up at Sherlock with as angry a face as he's ever seen John make.  
  
He cannot possibly still be upset. Can he?  
  
"Where have you been. You've been gone for hours."  
  
"Why didn't you text me then?"  
  
John throws something at him. It is Sherlock's mobile phone. He hadn't taken it with him.  
  
"Oh."  
  
"Yeah, 'oh'."  
  
The tension is really considerable for such a trivial offense. Sherlock might be able to defuse this by saying 'I'm sorry', but isn't prepared to go that far.  
  
"It wasn't intentional," he says.  
  
"No, that's the point, it was bloody thoughtless." John gets up from the desk and shuts his computer. "Now I know you're okay, I am going to take a shower, and I am going to bed, _alone_ , thanks. There's Chinese in the fridge if you want food, good _night_."  
  
He stomps into the bathroom and the pipes squeak as the water starts running to the shower. Sherlock realises he is still wearing his coat and takes it off. About to slip the phone into his pocket, he stops and looks at Texts: Received.  
  
Minutes after he'd left, from John: I'm sorry, come back?  
  
Oh.  
  
 _Yeah, 'oh'._  
  



	6. Chapter 6

Sherlock stands still and considers his options.  
  
First, he will need to eat.  
  
John finishes his shower while Sherlock is eating orange chicken and goes up the stairs to his room without even looking in Sherlock's direction. When he gets to the top of the stairs, the sound of his door being shut. And then being locked.  
  
Sherlock grins to himself around his chopsticks. As though the old locks in this place could keep him out. John knows that, too. It's just a gesture, like throwing the phone - but not deleting the text.  
  
After food, he must wait a little. Too soon with the belladonna, and he'll vomit. A good time for a shower for himself. He takes his time, fastidious as ever, maybe even a little more so. While he does, he wonders about John upstairs. Is he...? No, surely not, not after being made self conscious about it. John doesn't know how Sherlock knows, so he can't know that Sherlock can't hear anything right now, he could be touching himself up there _right now_ and thinking about Sherlock doing things to him or about doing things to Sherlock and...  
  
Well, _this_ does not seem to be caused by the belladonna, since he hasn't had any yet. Sherlock can't really disavow ownership of the erection, oh all right, _his_ erection, this time, it's his own response while thinking about John.  
  
It may not, strictly speaking, be the very first time it's ever happened. But it's the first time it's happened when he had to acknowledge it. He's still not going to do a thing about it.  
  
He... he _could_. But he's not going to.  
  
He'd wanted to feel what John feels. This is part of that.  
  
Once out of the shower, hair dried (but no further trouble taken in anticipation of rumpling), clad in pyjamas and t-shirt and nothing else, Sherlock holds the two bottles in his hand and thinks about it for almost three full minutes.  
  
Then carefully he takes the orchid tincture under his tongue and the diluted belladonna drops in his eyes, puts the bottles away again, and dims the lights in the sitting room while he sits down to wait.  
  
First Sherlock tries a small side experiment, opening his laptop and engaging the profile he devised for using the internet with dilated pupils. Pictures and video are definitely too bright, but text can be displayed in a milder color than white, on black, in a large easy to read font.  
  
Branching out from glossaries of terms, Sherlock investigates a few text only forums that are less stupid than most while simultaneously overflowing with sex advice, and gleans the illuminating idea that it may have been the technical, clinical terms that had 'turned John off', a usefully descriptive phrase. _Penis_ and _fellatio_ and so on could be perfectly acceptable _concepts_ when described differently. John himself hadn't put it that way in his head, had he? _Suck my cock_ , and _fuck your mouth_ , those were the way he put it when he didn't know anyone could hear him. So the answer to Sherlock's question earlier is, _Both_.  
  
At least this time he can blame the belladonna...  
  
There is a wealth of information on this topic, and Sherlock absorbs as much as he can before his pupils get too enlarged for even the special setup to allow for reading a lit screen. Then he closes the lid, heart pounding, and sits back, breathing deeply, easing into the sensation of flying through the universe at great speed, through the salivating phase (forgot water, has to go get it), the sensation of his feet not reaching the floor.  
  
All the time he listens for John upstairs. But John is sleeping.  
  
Only when he's reached the part where he feels clarity and a sort of calm excitement does Sherlock get up and creep upstairs to pick the lock on John's door.  
  
John's asleep. He didn't touch himself. Sherlock just somehow knows that by the way he is sleeping. The room doesn't feel as though anything had happened. That's a new sort of data. Sherlock wasn't getting room data before. Interesting.  
  
It's nice and dark in here. John's bedroom just has the one window and has only the merest hint of lights from outside peeping through at the bottom of the blinds.  
  
If John hadn't wanted Sherlock in here, he would have left his bedside light on. That would have kept Sherlock out. Sherlock wonders if he thought of that.  
  
Well, he could have thought of it, if he really wanted to keep Sherlock out. But just today he'd texted _I'm sorry, come back_ , and the message has still been received.  
  
"John," he says softly. One does not startle a war veteran awake. The gun is in the bedside drawer, but Sherlock does not care to find out how quickly John can lay his hands on it in an adrenaline charged moment.  
  
"John..." A flicker of awareness inside John, responding to his voice. "John. Are you awake?"  
  
"Hmmnn."  
  
"John."  
  
"What _now_."  
  
There, language. John's brain is engaged enough to know who is in the room. Sherlock is clear to proceed without being shot. - Probably.  
  
"I want to sleep with you. You _said_ it was all right." Last night he had.  
  
"I said I was going to sleep alone. And how did you get in here?"  
  
John's grumpy voice is at odds with his feelings about Sherlock being here after all. He is excited. He doesn't want to be angry. He wants Sherlock to be here in his bed. He wishes he could have the light on to see but he knows it will hurt Sherlock's eyes.  
  
He _did_ think about it.  
  
"You said you were _going to bed_ alone. Which you did."  
  
"Oh, God, are you a lawyer now?"  
  
"No. Please?"  
  
Sherlock  knows very well the answer will be a Yes, but he has the tactical sensitivity to wait. It isn't a long wait.  
  
"Oh all _right_."  
  
John is a shrouded lump under the blankets. Sherlock climbs onto John's bed and leans against him like a dog.  
  
Sigh. "You _can_ get under the covers you know."  
  
Yes. He can _now_. And does.  
  
To his surprise he finds John - not quite naked, but really nearly. The quality of _shy amusement_ from John as Sherlock's hands make this discovery is really rather rewarding. So is the heat of his skin, stored up under the blankets. But,  
  
"Pants?? You wear _pants_ to sleep in?"  
  
"This time I did, yeah." Pants, Q.E.D.  
  
"But you don't usually."  
  
"No."  
  
"Well, take them _off_."  
  
"Not till I feel like it."  
  
 _That_ is an interestingly worded reply. Not negative at all. Challenging. And all the time they are talking, Sherlock's hands are moving up and down John's back and his face is pushed against John's neck. And the proportion of _worry_ is much less, which is nice, and there is more than a hint of _anticipation_ , which is hopeful. But there is some _irritation_ too, from today.  
  
"Did you pick the door lock?" John's hand is on his head, as though trained to go there, but he doesn't pet. Just rests it there.  
  
Is he still thinking about that? Isn't it obvious? "Yes, of course."  
  
 _Exasperation_. There is a point he's missing, it seems.  
  
"You can't _do_ that, Sherlock. No - I know you _literally_ can, I mean you _shouldn't_. You could have knocked on the door. I would have let you in. You didn't give me a choice."  
  
"But you _were_ hoping I would come up."  
  
"Yes, that you'd come up and _knock_."  
  
"Oh."  
  
John actually thinks it, _Yeah, 'oh'_ , but restrains himself from saying it aloud. Sherlock wonders how often he does that.  
  
"I should have knocked," he says, so John will be satisfied he understands.  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Okay."  
  
John laughs. _Exasperation_ intensifies but intertwines with that _helpless fondness_.  
  
He's failed to do something, but John doesn't really mind. That's fine then. Moving on.  
  
John's text had said, 'I'm sorry', but he hadn't done anything wrong. Sherlock hates saying he is sorry - he is not, for example, the slightest bit sorry about picking the lock, no matter how much it annoys John. Knocking is not the best way to wake a war veteran either, whatever John thinks about the ethics of the matter, and Sherlock isn't sorry he didn't do that - except that it might indeed have been interesting for John to have answered the door, all sleepy and warm, in nothing but his pants.  
  
But Sherlock can say it sometimes. When it feels right. "I'm sorry about before. Asking embarrassing questions. I was _trying_ to be practical." Because he can't help trying to justify himself there at the end.  
  
John pushes his hand into Sherlock's hair and gives it a little tug. It feels _delicious_ , it sends a bolt of electric sensation down his spine like a whip crack.  
  
John is saying, "You didn't say anything wrong. Be sorry for walking off without your _phone_ , you tit."  
  
"I _am_ sorry I did that," Sherlock admits. It would have shortened his walk tremendously.  
  
He pulls free of John for a moment, long enough to pull his t-shirt off and then resume his position, drinking in John's feelings, skin to skin.  
  
John draws his breath in sharply, his heart accelerates under Sherlock's head. There are feelings spinning out from him that Sherlock doesn't know names for, like colours so specific and subtle that they would have to be named by complex, subtle phrases rather than merely abstract words.  
  
"I wish I could see you," John says softly.  
  
"What for?"  
  
 _Incredulous amusement_ , and _protective fondness_. "Because you're nice to look at." _Deliberate, gross understatement_ practically shouts through the weak-sauce compliment. John thinks he is beautiful, as a matter of fact. He has heard John think it before, more than once. He can feel it now. Sherlock, blushing in the dark, lays his hot cheek down against John's chest.  
  
"The light's too bright. You don't have a dimmer switch," he mumbles.  
  
"I know." And _finally_ John is stroking his hair.  
  
"I have a question," Sherlock says after a while.  
  
"Okay..." and John tenses up a little, and he is definitely expecting something even more embarrassing than earlier. Or perhaps a repeat of same.  
  
"It's nothing to do with penises," Sherlock says, reassuringly.  
  
The moment before John bursts out laughing is so precious, a special thing. The laughter is brilliant too but the moment before, when John starts to recoil and then hesitates as though frozen in mid air and then sees how funny it is: Sherlock tucks that moment away on an exalted shelf in the Mind Palace. It is extraordinary.  
  
The laugh goes on a while. Sherlock laughs too, just because John is laughing and it feels good and he can feel how funny it is to John, that Sherlock said the word while reassuring him it wasn't about the word. Also, _penis_ is an even funnier/more shocking word in the plural than in the singular, but Sherlock has no idea why.  
  
"Okay," John says, and there is still laughter breaking his voice up like static in a radio broadcast, but it's holding together well enough to be understood, "what's it to do with then?"  
  
"Kissing."  
  
This puts a stop to John's laughter, but not in a shocked or embarrassed way. Not at all.  
  
"Right, what about it."  
  
"You like it? It's something you like to do? In general?"  
  
He can feel the answer - a surge of _pleased interest_ , but he waits for John to say it. "Yeah. I really like it." There is a tinge of _cautious disbelief_ , as though this is something John had really thought was not an option with Sherlock.  
  
"Well - May I?"  
  
"Can I ask _you_ something first?"  
  
"Yes, anything."  
  
"Have you ever been with anyone before? At all? In any way? I mean, have you ever kissed anyone... _been_ kissed? Not counting relatives."  
  
"What is the difference between kissing and being kissed?"  
  
"Sherlock. Anyone? Ever? On the mouth? I'm asking."  
  
"Well." He frowns. The incident at the Christmas pageant when he was six, waiting backstage. That little girl playing the angel had kissed Sherlock right on the lips, 'for luck!', and he was _furious_. He'd been so shocked and angry that he hit her, bloodied her nose, actually - hadn't meant to do _that_ , but no one was interested in Sherlock's explanation, only her tears and her nose. He wasn't allowed to be a shepherd after that, not that he _cared_ , and the angel costume was spectacularly blood-spattered in a way that literally made the baby Jesus cry.  
  
"No," he admits. "Is it important? I don't know how to do anything, but I've been doing research and you know I can _learn_."  
  
John is very quiet and if Sherlock could not feel his feelings through his skin, he might have thought that John didn't like this answer, or even that there is something wrong with Sherlock for never having done this thing he never wanted to do before now. That's not what John feels. Definitely not. What he does feel is complicated but it is in no way negative, except perhaps in the sense that John feels _inadequacy_ at the prospect of actually being first to kiss (or be kissed by? Differentiation still unspecified -) Sherlock.  
  
"You can't possibly get it wrong," says Sherlock, lifting his head, feeling lifted up by the certainty that John _wants to kiss_ him and _wants to do right_ by him and make sure it's nice. Sherlock appreciates the thought, literally appreciates it, luxuriates in it. John is hesitating, holding back at the brink of committing himself to this course. As if he has not already committed to it. But Sherlock knows to wait, knows how long to wait, to let John think it through.  
  
John is thinking, _Of course I can get it wrong, I can get everything wrong, I don't know anything either, not like this, not with you - you - never been kissed, you and your never-been-kissed mouth talking about sucking my cock, my God, what am I doing to you?_  
  
"You're not doing anything to me," Sherlock says, his mouth mere inches from John's mouth. "I'm the one who broke into your room."  
  
"What? how do you - " John _knows_ he didn't say that aloud and is starting to say 'know what I was thinking', but Sherlock interrupts,  
  
"It isn't difficult. I just haven't wanted to before. Before you." If he has to be the one to reassure, he'll do it, temporarily at least. "Don't we love each other?"  
  
He'd known John would react strongly to this question... but Sherlock frankly underestimated the intensity. The word _love_ falls into John as from a great height and starts a chain reaction on contact. _Incredulous. Delighted. Justified._ Above all: _justified_. A question he'd never thought to be asked - but he is ready with the answer. He has always been ready with the answer.  
  
"Yes," John whispers fiercely.  
  
"Then kiss me."  
  
John's hand cups the side of Sherlock's face now, making sure of his location in the dark - what to John is the dark. To Sherlock, it is just a dimly lit room, and he can see John's face perfectly well.  
  
But John, it turns out, needs no light by which to kiss - just a little guidance in docking, as it were. And with that...  
  
John leans up a little and pulls Sherlock down a little and their mouths touch. Though it's dark, his eyes are closed.  
  
John's mouth is warm. He brushed his teeth before bed. His hand on Sherlock's face is gentle, the touch of his mouth is soft and beseeching and it is nice, and so is the _bewildered awkward tenderness_ emanating from John, but it's not... quite...  
  
Sherlock slides his hand from John's ribs to his hip and lets his lips part. John breathes in sharply through his nose. Their tongues touch together, move apart, touch again, first in Sherlock's mouth and then in John's. It's something like a dance, something like music. No one ever told him that.  
  
 _Heat_ and _want_ and _greed_ are in John, and so are _sweetness_ and a _dogged protectiveness_ fighting with the other things, so tedious, Sherlock is keenly interested in that greedy part of John.  
  
The clock has started on something else that is going to happen. Later Sherlock will be very surprised at himself that he hadn't anticipated this possibility. No matter how carefully he adjusts the dose it _does_ disorder his thinking - either the orchids, or the belladonna, or both of them in gestalt. He gains sensory throughput, but at the cost of order. Not all order, just some...  
  
But in the strictest of fairness, when Sherlock began this experiment he had really not anticipated any need to factor in _tongue kissing._  
  
It will be pointed out to him later that he is the one who not only initiated the kissing, but also the snogging, and as he _should_ have known, maybe he _did_ know and he did it on purpose.  
  
It does look that way later, a bit. But the simple explanation is the truth: he is excited and in love and he just isn't thinking.  
  
***  
John lay in his bed with Sherlock fitted up along his side and fell into the kiss, heart pounding.  
  
 _Kissing. You like it?_  
  
 _Sweet Christ yes._  
  
He loved it. He was good at it, actually. Very good. Because he loved it.  
  
And he could scarcely believe Sherlock wanted to - without even thinking about it too closely John had assumed it would be out of the question as too intimate, too boringly obvious, or too many germs - but Sherlock _did_ want to.  Insisted on it.  
  
First kiss ever.  
  
 _Don't we love each other?_  
  
Rhetorical question. And the nicest thing Sherlock had ever said to John and probably, to anyone.  
  
 _Yes_.  
  
Never felt more like sharing somebody's soul. John touched Sherlock's face, marveled at how smooth it felt under his fingertips. His own face was much rougher. Hadn't shaved since this morning.  
  
Sherlock's mouth tasted odd, a little like bitter flowers. His lips and tongue were warm and pliant and he was brand new at this, faithfully echoing back the things John did, not quite improvising on his own yet.  
  
John didn't mind. He had time. And who else on earth would have had the good sense to take this slow and enjoy it, and savour it, and treasure it as precious, and... take a secret little thrill at being first.  
  
 _What's so special about being first?_  
  
John broke the kiss, breathing hard. "What...?"  
  
"Nothing."  
  
They'd been kissing. He was being stupid.  
  
Sherlock slithered out of the bed and from the sound of it... in fact John could sort of see him just a little... it was not as dark as it was before, could it be dawn already outside... no, the blazing-bright numbers of the alarm clock contradicted that idea. His eyes had adjusted.  
  
What Sherlock was doing was slithering out of his pyjama bottoms and then slithering back in the bed with John. He really was doing a lot of slithering. He was very slithery. And silky. And slithery.  
  
John laughed, and then caught his breath. "Sherlock..."  
  
"Yes." Sherlock's arm was around his waist.  
  
"I... feel... strange."  
  
He did. Something was not right, something dreamlike and intrusive that wasn't going away. It was not a burst of nervousness at having Sherlock naked in his bed, it was really not that. He was rather enjoying that. It was something... physical...?  
  
"What's wrong?" Deep dark voice near his ear and he shivered and he wanted to say nothing, nothing was wrong... these moments were too good to waste saying _I feel dizzy and hot and like I'm floating off the bed and I -_  
  
There was no pain, or John would have suspected he was having a heart attack. His heart was just - racing. Could he be having a stroke? The symptoms didn't match. For all he felt so strange, he felt - _symmetrically_ strange.  
  
Ugh - his mouth, he was salivating, he turned away from Sherlock to grope for the bedside glass of water to try to clear his mouth. He was drooling like a dog, it was horrible. Like he'd been poisoned.  
  
"Oh!" said Sherlock, in his Eureka voice. And then, "Oh," again, with a distinctly guilty sound this time.  
  
John wiped his mouth, shaking his head. "What is it? What is this."  
  
"John... I assure you this was not part of my experiment. I had no intention - "  
  
"Sherlock," he groaned.  
  
"I didn't consider the risk of tongue kissing. I am sorry. That wasn't scientific at all."  
  
"Risk?"  
  
"My orchid experiment. I made a tincture... it's taken sublingually."  
  
"Jesus Christ."  
  
"And. Um. There are eye drops and those probably also - "  
  
Yes, tear ducts draining down to the back of the throat, whatever he took that way was in his mouth too. "And what was in the eye drops?" He knew the answer, didn't feel like waiting to drag it out of Sherlock. "Was it belladonna?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
John wiped his mouth. The hypersalivation was easing off now, thankfully. But he could have frothed at the mouth all on his own, how dare Sherlock take poison, and how dare he poison John too!  
  
"Don't think of it as poison, it has medicinal uses, many medicines are poisonous if -"  
  
"Oh shut up!"  
  
Hurt silence.  
  
John sighed. Sherlock hated being told to shut up. He had forgotten that so quickly. "I'm sorry, _don't_ shut up. But don't go talking to me about what's _medicinal_ , you and your not-illegal drugs..."  
  
"You keep framing it as though it were a bad habit. I am _not_ getting high. Do _you_ feel high? I am improving what my _mind_ can do."  
  
"Why are you trying to fix something that _isn't broken?_ " An agonised plea. "You're probably the smartest man alive, isn't that _enough?_ "  
  
"No, of course it isn't. I couldn't understand things I _wanted_ to understand."  
  
"Like what?" John was thinking _particle physics, string theory, dolphin language?_  
  
"You."  
  
John was silent, turning this over in his mind. _Wanted to understand me?_  
  
"Yes. Your feelings. I didn't understand them because I couldn't feel them. By itself the effects of my experiment were... limited. But when you touched me - "  
  
"I touched _you??_ " _Sherlock_ was the one who practically tackled him down to the sofa.  
  
"Yes, when you took my pulse."  
  
And Sherlock touched John's wrist, by way of illustration. And John gasped.  
  
"When you touched me, I could feel you."  
  
John closed his eyes but it did nothing to stop the torrent of thought and feeling that broke across him.  
  
 ** _yes you touched me first and that's when I felt you and once I had felt you I wanted to feel more. I can hear in your head and when I touch you I can feel what you feel and now you can hear and feel me too (_** _can't you_ ** _) and you know now (_** _don't you_ ** _) what I feel and I do make mistakes and I am sorry for the mistakes I have made like kissing you with drugs in my mouth and for thinking that you could just get over what I had to do to save you John I am sorry John I lay there playing my part I couldn't even feel you touch my wrist then it was so numb but I heard your voice and the things you said when you cried and it was hard it was hard just lying there when you sounded like that it made me feel sick and the smell of the blood and I was hurt when I fell (_** _you know_ ** _) even though I wasn't dead and I am sorry._**  
  
"You understand," said Sherlock. John, shuddering, whispered "Yes."  
  
 ** _I was never interested in sex before because I never was in love before  (_** _you know_ ** _) you always rejected the merest idea of doing that with me so I didn't worry about it but then I could hear you thinking things about me and I didn't know you felt like that but now I feel it now I know it and you still think there's something sort of wrong with it (_** _don't you_ ** _) but there isn't so please lie back down and you can give me something to do with my mouth -_ **  
  
"Stop that, can you stop - for a minute - "  
  
The running commentary came to a halt and there were just - feelings. _Anxious hopeful frightened fond worried aroused longing loving._  
  
This too was a fast tumble, but it was much easier to take than the roaring river of words in his head. No one could actually talk as fast as Sherlock could think, not even Sherlock.  
  
"You could really - hear me thinking?"  
  
"Oh yes."  
  
"And - " anxiety! " _see_ what I saw in my head?"  
  
"Oh - No. Just hearing the sorts of things you said to yourself in your head."  
  
This, John realised, explained why Sherlock was so very sure about John's interest in fellatio. He turned red all over in embarrassment.  
  
"Oh," he said.  
  
"I feel how embarrassed you are. But supposing I want to, John? Actually want to, and you're not doing anything wrong? Is it okay then?"  
  
"I don't know."  
  
"It _would_ be interesting to see what you saw in your head, though -"  
  
"Oh my God no."  
  
"Well, fine. It doesn't work that way anyway." Change of tone, "Come back. I'm cold."  
  
John turned toward that, as Sherlock had known he would, if it was framed as something Sherlock needed.  
  
 ** _I want to do something to give you pleasure I want it for myself I want to feel it (_** _you should_ ** _) let me do that._**  
  
"No, I don't want you to."  
  
"Liar."  
  
"I don't want you to _tonight_ , all right, let's be clear on it, I don't want you doing that the first time you do anything, I don't care I just _don't_ , and anyway - no offense but I've had enough of your _saliva_ until we both come down off this shit."  
  
"Oh."  
  
"Yeah, _oh_." _You need to think about these things._  
  
"But I wanted to."  
  
"But I wasn't going to let you anyway." _Not this time_. "So think of something else or just leave it."  
  
John was smiling as he spoke in these grumpy tones, and he knew that Sherlock could have told this with only the ordinary sort of senses. Smiles are audible in the voice, even to Sherlock.  
  
"I didn't research anything else and now my eyes are too sensitive to read from a screen."  
  
"Okay, honestly now, have you not _ever_ touched yourself once in your whole life? Not even as a teenager?"  
  
"Deleted all that."  
  
"All right, fine." John felt less exasperated by this than he might have done. If he could have deleted some of his more desperate teenage years he would have done it too. He wondered how Sherlock actually did that. Delete things.  
  
He also wondered, not for the first time, if the things Sherlock said he deleted actually stayed that way. It was all very well to _decide_ how you were going to remember things or not, but enforcing it was hard enough with an ordinary brain.  
  
"I can hear that," Sherlock said. "Things I delete _stay deleted_."  
  
"You'll have to re-learn then, won't you."  
  
 _Mystified, worried, reluctant._  
  
"You could watch me."  
  
 _Diverted: Interested._  
  
"I'm not much to look at," John said, "but if anybody you know _knows how_ to jerk off, by God it's me."  
  
 ** _what do you MEAN not much to look at_** , and John was a little shocked at the sharply offended tone and even recoiled from it.  
  
 ** _you are being so STUPID_** , and it occurred to John that deleting one's teenage years _might_ doom one to never entirely outgrowing them.  
  
 ** _AND I CAN STILL HEAR YOU!_**  
  
"Stop _shouting_ at me!"  
  
Sherlock made a sound like an old dog settling down.  
  
"What do _you_ want?" asked John.  
  
"Kissing. I like it."  
  
Just this little remark was exciting. Sherlock liked it. He couldn't have done _too_ badly.  
  
"Your self deprecation is _unbearably tedious_. Kiss me."  
  
"No, I said no."  
  
"What's the harm? You can't have gotten more than a tiny _fraction_ of what I've taken."  
  
"It's still more than I should have had and you know it and I don't want any more of it. Stop whining. You'll think about it next time, won't you."  
  
"Yes."  
  
He pulled Sherlock into his arms and found him a curious mixture of _eager_ and _sulky_ , his long limbs getting in the way of everything. Was it just that he could feel what Sherlock could feel? Or was it that Sherlock knew he could, and that changed the feelings he had? This was almost madness, this was almost a dream. Almost.  
  
 _Resignation_ , renewed _interest_ , increased _interest - Annoyance_.  
  
"You are still wearing _pants_."  
  
This was an unnecessary observation. John knew it all too well. So did Sherlock as he had both hands on the back of them.  
  
"All right," he sighed, and finally took them off.  
  
 ** _begone stalwart defender of john's virtue._**  
  
 _did it occur to you for even one moment that it was YOUR virtue I gave a shit about._  
  
 ** _SO old fashioned._**  
  
Then John realised, really _realised_ that they were bickering without even _speaking_ , and it startled him. He lost his balance for a moment. He _wobbled_.  
  
He did remember, not so long ago, actually wondering, consciously wondering if he weren't going mad.  
  
 _And now, here, look_. Everything John ever wanted somehow, and _more_ , almost magical wasn't it, and less too, because even in a wish fulfilling fantasy Sherlock was only _interested_ in John when under the influence -  
  
 ** _that's. not. true._**  
  
John was rolled roughly onto his back and pinned down at the shoulders and Sherlock was sitting astride him and they were both naked.  
  
Could still be a dream. Could still be hallucination. Fantasy. Straitjacket. All in his head as it leaned against a padded wall someplace.  
  
"Johnnn," Sherlock shook him a little, laughing, actually _laughing_ at him.  
  
And they were both absolutely naked and Sherlock was on top of him.  
  
"It's not true, you know," Sherlock said, "I am _always_ interested in you. I _study_ you. But I thought I knew everything I could know and I didn't. There's just always... more to you. And you're _not_ mad, mad people don't tend to think they are, and you're really not. No madder than me. Saner than Mrs Hudson, certainly."  
  
This diverted John so completely from his morbid turn of thought that he laughed. _No madder than you?_ His hands were on Sherlock's thighs. "You've been eavesdropping on Mrs Hudson?"  
  
"She was up watching telly. I thought she was just muttering to herself. And then, well, I was listening to you."  
  
"Ah. Yeah."  
  
Sherlock leaned down and his face was almost touching John's when John said, "Wait." _I just told you no!_  
  
"Don't worry." Sherlock's mouth touched his and John was outraged at being ignored, what did he mean don't worry? But then John realised what it meant, Sherlock wasn't using his tongue, just his lips. His mouth moved quickly from John's mouth when the temptation welled up between them anyway, and wandered over John's face.  
  
It could have been a gentle, tickling sort of thing, like butterflies, but this was Sherlock and it wasn't. And he wouldn't stop even when John said "Ow!" and "don't _bite_ me, you twat!" and "DAMMIT I SAID," so within one minute they were wrestling and giggling and then Sherlock got John's elbow in his eye and suddenly he thought it was all much less funny.  
  
They fell apart into two, but their feet were still mingling down in the rucked-up covers.  
  
"God, you're weird." Admiringly, the way he'd praise Sherlock for cleverness.  
  
"Yes."  
  
Sherlock was rubbing his smarting eye and sounded - and felt - _sulky_. John reached out to touch his face, 'tsk'-ing when Sherlock flinched back.  
  
 _Come on, it's not so bad, let me..._  
  
Feel? Touch? He couldn't see that well, even though (he realised now) his pupils were enlarged like Sherlock's. From the belladonna, probably, though it was possible the orchids had that effect as well.  
  
He touched Sherlock's injured cheek with the gentlest possible fingers. He didn't need to see, of course. He could feel where it hurt. And it did hurt. But it was starting to ease off already.  
  
 _You're fine. I hit you much harder that one time when you wanted me to._  
  
 ** _this was an accident, (_** _you know_ ** _) that time I hit first._**  
  
Yes, he knew, it was the only way to get John to hit Sherlock. It didn't take him long to figure it out, though.  
  
 _Well I'm sorry. Really._  
  
He leaned in and showed Sherlock how you were _supposed_ to kiss someone's face when you weren't being weird and bitey. And again, the temptation to just give in and kiss his mouth properly and never mind the consequences was immediate, and awful, like undertow dragging at the soles of John's feet. They both _wanted_ it so much.  
  
"Please," **_please kiss me john please it's fine it'll be fine_**  
  
" _No_."  
  
He turned his face aside. And there was the long pale line of Sherlock's throat, faintly illuminated by the bedside clock but glowing like moonlight to John's widened eyes.  
  
John leaned down and fastened his mouth to the side of that pale neck and bit.  
  
Sherlock gasped.  
  
The effect of it rippled back and forth between them. Sherlock was _surprised_ and _aroused_ and, for some reason, _impressed_. The physical sensation of the bite went all down Sherlock's body and his pounding heart sent blood rushing to follow it. His head tipped back. John could feel all these things even as he felt his own body, aching at that sound coming from Sherlock's mouth, _shock_ and _pleasure_ pulsing continuously out of him.  
  
Oh. He needed to pursue this. 


	7. Chapter 7

Sherlock has always really liked it when John gets fed up and takes charge of things. It is sometimes an inconvenience, of course. But nearly always worth it.  
  
He wants the kiss as badly as he says he does, now he's tried it he wants more of it, lots more. John is very good at kissing. But he pushes the issue where he might have left it alone, and John is after all very good at denial of things. The biting is unexpectedly pleasurable. Arousing. Almost _automatically_ arousing. Perhaps he could be aroused _involuntarily_ by such a bite.  
  
Sherlock isn't usually given to visual imagination. People talk about movies or pictures in their heads - John has described both in the past - but Sherlock doesn't store memories that way and he doesn't construct possibilities that way either - not really. Sherlock sees _words_ in his head, in the world. _Sometimes_ he visualises molecular structures. Oh. And maps.  
  
But for a moment there's a thought picture in his head, not even from his own point of view, dissociated like a dream. He imagines, watches himself imagining, John tying him down and biting him like that while he struggles and pretends to protest...  
  
"John," he moans, "Please? More."  
  
"You like me biting you." John is breathless, amused. "Of course you do." _That's why you bit me. People show what they like in bed by what they do there. Even you._  
  
Sherlock starts to answer but never gets further than "Why - " when John bites again, a little harder.  
  
"Onnhh."  
  
"Just on your neck? Or how about here."  
  
He is not biting hard enough to do lasting damage, though it might leave marks. He is biting hard enough to make Sherlock gasp with how close it comes to real pain without ever quite reaching it. This time it is on his chest, just by his armpit, another muscled place that can take John's teeth.  
  
He knows what's next, he can feel what's next, he lies there trembling and knows John is going to bite one of his nipples and it will really, truly hurt so when he feels the least touch he cries out, but it's only John's fingers, teasingly rubbing.  
  
"Easy," John says.  
  
Sherlock doesn't even know what that means. But John bends his head and kisses instead. Then uses his tongue. Were tongues not out of bounds? Well it is John's rule and who is Sherlock to remind him he's breaking it. It feels too good to stop. He'd been so afraid of pain there because of the sensitivity. John teases it with the tip of his tongue and Sherlock moans.  
  
John is thinking, _You are mine_ , in a way that's both possessive and protective, and his hand is sliding down Sherlock's belly. Sherlock realises what John's doing an instant before he touches. Even now he wasn't really expecting it to go this far, or not this way. It is John who wants sex. Sherlock doesn't need -  
  
"oh please John yes yes _please touch me_ ," the words rush out of his mouth leaving his surprised self behind.  
  
He's gotten quite good over the years at ignoring this part of his body, but not while John is _touching_ it. That's just not fair -  
  
John's warm hand, wrapping firmly around the shaft of his painfully erect penis, stroking, making it weep, making Sherlock's toes curl.  
  
"that's so good yes please oh Jooooohn," his mind is not in control of his mouth at all, it is babbling things that his body wants and leaving him entirely out of it, "don't stop oh don't don't oh please John?" He sounds like he's crying, he is sort of crying.  
  
"Take it easy. I won't stop. I won't stop. Come on." Stroking. Urging more heat through jumped-up, hypersensitive flesh. "Let go."  
  
"Please I _can't_ \- " He fights it, for some reason he fights it, this isn't what he meant to - if he comes he will _come to pieces_ and John will feel and see -  
  
 _That's right_. John is panting against Sherlock's neck. _Do this for me. Let go._  
  
 _ **But** -_  
  
 _Don't we love each other?_  
  
 _ **Yes**._  
  
Finally John gives in and kisses him, harsh with hunger, and Sherlock stiffens and screams into his mouth. _John. John. Oh John_ \- exploding, annihilating in John's hand. Writhing. Drowning. Gladly: drowning.  
  
John is with him. John feels it all. John shudders against him in his own helpless orgasm and between one heartbeat and another they tumble down together into the dark.  
  
***  
He opened his eyes. Gasped in a breath, lifted his head.  
  
By habit, John's eyes fixed on the clock. Eight-eleven, he could just barely read over Sherlock's tousled head.  
  
God, he never slept so late. But...  
  
Well.  
  
John felt the blush creeping down his neck and wished so much that it wouldn't. How could he be embarrassed now, but he was, he just was, looking down Sherlock's long pale nude body as he slept and seeing dried cum on his belly and along his ribs. _Defiled_. But even as he thought that John knew that wasn't what happened, that was not what it was, and Sherlock would certainly have told him off for being stupid about it if he weren't passed out dead to the world.  
  
On the other hand, Sherlock was very likely to complain about waking up to find _stuff_ all over him no matter what the source, and no matter what, John needed the bathroom. He moved gingerly at first but it soon became obvious that Sherlock was not going to wake up until he was ready to wake up, no matter what happened around him.  
  
 _I had a lot less of what he had. And I'm bleary enough._  
  
Though some of that might have just been from oversleeping. It was hard to say.  
  
John stood beside the bed putting on his dressing gown and looked down again at Sherlock as he slept. He would have pulled blankets up over Sherlock but that was impossible, they were tangled up under Sherlock's legs, and he didn't look uncomfortable in any case. He looked kind of pleased, come to that. He was smiling a little and his hands were relaxed and open. (John kept his own fingernails very short because he often made fists in his sleep for hours on end and if he didn't keep them short his nails would cut into his palms.)  
  
He went downstairs, ears alert for sounds of Mrs Hudson waiting to spring at him. If they had been in Sherlock's bedroom last night John had no doubt that she would already have been in for a look, and she'd have gotten an eyeful this time if it weren't for the extra flight of stairs. He blessed the chance that had them up in his room instead.  
  
Well, it wasn't chance. It had been Sherlock pissing him off. But whatever.  
  
In the bathroom, relieved, teeth brushed, he found a clean flannel, soaked it in hot water and wrung it out. He kept it between his hands as he went back upstairs, keeping it warm. Climbing back into the bed, he slid up close to Sherlock and cleaned him off with the flannel. It took some doing. Semen was a pernicious substance when allowed to dry overnight.  
  
Sherlock said, "If you'd cleaned it off earlier it would have been easier."  
  
"I'm sure it would. Only I was sleeping then too."  
  
"You woke me up."  
  
"So sorry." He turned away and threw the used flannel towards the laundry hamper.  
  
"No, I mean - " Sherlock grabbed for John's wrist and John turned to look down at him in surprise. "You woke me up downstairs, I heard you thinking downstairs about Mrs Hudson."  
  
John narrowed his eyes. "Are you sure?" He leaned in close to look at Sherlock's pupils, but they were normal in the light of day, his eyes mostly pale blue again instead of mostly black. Sherlock stared sullenly back as though for a mug shot.  
  
"You might have been dreaming."  
  
"I wasn't."  
  
They stared at each other. Sherlock glanced down at John's dressing gown and then reached out with one finger, pulling the belt undone.  
  
"Hey!"  
  
"I want to look at you."  
  
"Why??"  
  
But by then his arm was out of the sleeve and the rest of it fell off more or less all at once.  
  
"Did you get aroused while cleaning me up?"  
  
John bit his lip, his face painfully hot.  
  
"I don't understand why you don't admit it. Didn't we sort this out already? Come here, I'm cold."  
  
"I'm not falling for that every single time," John frowned, caught in an agony of hesitation. This was not last night. This was the cold sober light of day. Things were different now. Weren't they?  
  
"It doesn't make any difference," Sherlock said, and John wondered whether he was answering the spoken words or the silent thoughts. "I really am cold." He shivered. He _looked_ cold. He was acting, of course. John knew that. But it was enough to overcome his hesitation. Maybe Sherlock was a little cold, with the moisture from the flannel evaporating from his skin.  
  
"You could have just pulled up the blankets."  
  
"Those are all the way down _there_ ," said Sherlock as though he were as tall as Alice in Wonderland sending telegrams to her feet. Meanwhile he wrapped his limbs around John and pressed up close.  
  
"You've looked at my pupils. _Yours_ are normal again _too_ , by the way. Are you satisfied that I know what I'm doing, that I mean what I say? I am not under the influence of anything except a continued interest in you."  
  
"All right," John said, desperately, breathless now because Sherlock was rubbing up against him in a most unsubtle way. "All right, I believe you."  
  
"Good."  
  
Sherlock tried to kiss him, but John shied away. With an annoyed noise Sherlock said, "Problem?"  
  
"Yes," said John. "You need to brush your teeth."  
  
After only a little grumbling Sherlock went downstairs, stark naked as he was, and since he left the door ajar John listened as Mrs Hudson came in and encountered Sherlock down there in the hallway, and she squeaked her excuses as to why she had barged in now. John rocked with silent, appalled laughter as he heard Sherlock say "He's upstairs, and he won't kiss me till I've brushed my teeth. So if you'll excuse me."  
  
"Well, good for him," he heard her say, weakly, and then the sounds of her closing the door and going down the lower stairs.  
  
"That woman's fixation on my arse is alarming," said Sherlock when he came back, and John rolled back and forth in the bed, helpless with giggling. It was really just hearing Sherlock say _arse_ that made him laugh so hard.  
  
"I shudder to imagine what she intends to give us for Christmas this year," Sherlock added, but got no further before he was laughing too, helplessly laughing. He sagged down onto the bed and John pulled him in, warming skin chilled from going downstairs with skin that stayed comfortably toasty in the bed.  
  
He thanked Sherlock for brushing his teeth, properly. They lay clinging and kissing for almost an hour before hunger drove them out in search of breakfast.  
  
That day, after they were clean and dressed and almost normal in every way, Sherlock suddenly said he wanted to go out. To walk around a bit and get something to eat and maybe go to the cinema. And John felt wrong footed and left out until he realised Sherlock meant, _both_ of them should do this. Together.  
  
It was not as though Sherlock never proposed going out for something to eat, though it was rare enough, but he _never_ wanted to go to the cinema. John was puzzled, almost reluctant until Sherlock said he could pick the film, so John said fine, there was a Hitchcock series going at a revival house, Dial M for Murder, and Sherlock said fine.  
  
It was a weekend matinee. The house was almost full. Sherlock sat on the aisle to gain a little room for long legs. The film started.  
  
It could not have been longer than two minutes - after the short run of credits, and Grace Kelly hadn't even opened her mouth to speak yet - when Sherlock leaned over and whispered in John's ear, "This is _boring_."  
  
John turned his head to whisper something angry back but he never got the chance. Instead he got kissed.  
  
Sherlock's hand barely touched John's cheek but his mouth was not anything like so gentle. A thousand genies let out of a thousand bottles could not have been more eager to express their freedom and power. In public.  
  
 _Snogging me in public_ , squeaked John's brain, as the blonde in the red dress on screen talked in a languid, troubled way about being blackmailed over a letter.  
  
It was the longest, hottest kiss he had ever known and soon enough John did not care where he was. By the time they were thrown out (still early: Ray Milland talking to the undercover guy about where the key was hidden), John was glad to be leaving, eager to go home. To get Sherlock home.  
  
In the flat John shut and _locked_ the door ( _tough luck, Mrs Hudson_ ) before pushing Sherlock against the wall, still in his coat, kissing his face and biting his neck. He smelled so unbearably good, outdoors and smoke in the wool of his coat, and himself underneath; John could _eat_ him, and maybe he would.  
  
Only then did it actually occur to John.  
  
"This was a _date_."  
  
Well - yes! They went out together, had a bite to eat, snogged in a cinema, and here they were finishing in the front hallway with a proper kiss, soon to stumble to the bedroom. Two people who like each other going out and having fun: a date.  
  
 _Then coming home to shag. - A **good** date._  
  
"You have the most enormous blind spots," Sherlock said. "I used to suspect you of rather putting it on sometimes, but I know how it works now."  
  
"What do you mean... how it works?"  
  
He could have been offended at this, at the suggestion he was ever _putting_ anything _on_ , but they were pressed together body to body and John didn't have the attention to spare for being offended.  
  
"You have the most fun when you're being swept along in the moment, " Sherlock said, his voice a little overwhelming so close to John's ear, though he was almost whispering. "That's why you're with me, isn't it? It's only when you stop to worry about what things _mean_ that you get into trouble."  
  
John realised that when Sherlock said _with me_ , he did not mean this new _with_ -ness they were doing: he meant, since the beginning.  
  
Sherlock looked down into his face. John looked up at him. Sherlock's mouth was kiss bruised and his pupils were bigger than normal, but in the ordinary way people's eyes did that, when they were turned on. John knew his own were the same.  
  
"If I had said the word _date_ you would have been looking everywhere else but at me and wondering what everybody else but me thought. Instead you just had fun. With _me_."  
  
Sherlock had a _very_ superior sort of smile on his face.  
  
"It was a good date," John admitted, "though you might have let me watch a _few_ minutes of the movie."  
  
"They'll never let us in _there_ again," Sherlock said, sounding as gleeful as though that had been the object of the whole mission, and then he started undressing John. Coat off. Dropped. Jumper pulled over head. John reached for Sherlock's coat but Sherlock wouldn't let him do anything, unbuttoning John's shirt and pulling that away too.  
  
It was cold. The heat was going in the flat, but none of the vents were here in the hall. John was naked from the waist up, and now Sherlock was unfastening his trousers. And he _still_ pulled away from John's efforts to do anything about Sherlock's clothes and their stubborn insistence on being _on_.  
  
"What are you doing, let me - "  
  
"No, wait."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"I'm cold."  
  
"But _I'm_ cold too! _Colder_."  
  
"Won't be for long."  
  
Sherlock slid down the wall and knelt right down at John's feet, his hands dragging down trousers and pants all together and baring John completely to his gaze and touch. John was shivering. John was hard.  
  
His feet were still in his shoes and trapped in the tangle of trousers and pants. All he could do was hold on to the wall for support.  
  
Sherlock looked up at him. "Say something."  
  
 _"Will you please just suck my cock now!"_  
  
"Yes, I will." And oh God he did.  
  
Hot mouth, tasting him and taking him in, flickering tongue, warm hands gripping his thighs. John left one hand to support him against the wall and reached down with the other, touching Sherlock's hair... and it was not at all like his fantasies except in very specific and amazing ways. John would have assumed automatically that any real world experience must trump anything one could learn by reading on the internet. This may have been true on a level playing field, but.  
  
"Ahhh," he moaned, " _Yeahh_..."  
  
He might have locked the door, but they were right near it still and if he wasn't quieter Mrs Hudson was going to hear them. Him. Hear _him_ , because any sounds Sherlock could make around the cock in his mouth were not as apt to carry -  
  
" _Jesus yes suck me_ ," fingers tightening in Sherlock's hair, "oh God _yes_ ," voice ragged and much too loud.  
  
It wasn't just Mrs Hudson that would be able to hear him. His voice would carry right down the stairs to the street through the front door. He thought how well he could hear the violin from out on the pavement.  
  
But he was swept up in it, Sherlock had him swept up in it and he was just running along as he had always done, casting aside whatever held him back from keeping up, just like that.  
  
And it was good, "so good, _so fucking good_ ," between his teeth.  
  
It _was_ good, it was _desperately_ good, but John couldn't come like this, it was too difficult, keeping his balance and shivering with the cold and constantly choking back his voice when it got too loud. Fantasies about nighttime alleys were usually being had in a warm bed.  
  
"Sherlock," he groaned, " _Sherlock_ ," tugging at his hair, "stop a minute, _stop_."  
  
"Why," Sherlock said hoarsely, "am I doing it wrong." His breath panted hot against flesh wet from his saliva. It throbbed in response, yearning to be back inside that delicious mouth.  
  
"No! God no, I just - don't think I can come like this, can't we move - ? Bedroom? What are you - Oh." Sherlock had started freeing John's feet from his shoes so that he could step out of the rest of his clothes.  
  
"Why can't you, because you're standing up? Because you're cold?"  
  
"Cold mostly," as he stepped free, naked except for socks, "The bedroom's -" _Warm_ , he had been about to say, when Sherlock abruptly stood up, finally pulling off his coat - and briskly put it around John's shoulders. It was enormous on John of course and his arms automatically found the sleeves but his hands did not make it all the way out the ends of them.  
  
He closed his eyes in disbelief. _Oh that's - That's just - Too much._  
  
While he was doing this, Sherlock's hands were on his shoulders and John was steered around till his back was the one against the wall and his feet were no longer entangled and he was warm, yes he was warm all right, _naked in Sherlock's coat_ , the lining warm from Sherlock's body and smelling bewitchingly of him and slithering all over John's skin.  
  
Associations notwithstanding, it was a damned nice coat.  
  
He opened his eyes in time to see Sherlock leaning in to kiss his mouth and Sherlock slipped his hands into the coat to touch John's straining cock and it was unbearably - _naughty_ \- magnificently so.  
  
"Sherlock," and his face was as hot as though he'd been caught like this of his own doing, as though Sherlock had come home for his forgotten coat and found John as naked and guilty as Irene Adler in it -  
  
"Let's see if you can come now," in a deep dark velvety voice, and Sherlock sank back down in front of him to take John's cock back into the heat of his mouth.  
  
Now John had both hands free (if slightly encumbered by sleeves) and he didn't care if Mrs Hudson was looking through the keyhole.  
  
This, now, was rather _better_ than John's fantasy, and still in the sweetest ways it was the same. Crying out, biting his lips, he fucked. that. sweet. hot. mouth and Sherlock's fingers slid over his belly and clutched at his hips.  
  
"So fucking good, you're so fucking good you're _amazing_ \- " Because it didn't just give Sherlock pleasure when John praised him it gave John pleasure just giving it and it was true, it was always true in just the way Sherlock's miracles were always true.  
  
"Sher - lock - oh - my god I'm," but then his brain had to choose between command of language and enough proprioception to stay on his feet, and language didn't make the cut. Sherlock took him in deep and gagged a little and then John really lost it. He could not have stopped himself coming if his life had depended on it, nor Sherlock's life, nor the _world_ \- it could not have been undone.  
  
John cried out so loudly that he _had_ to be overheard out in the street, head tipped back against the wall, his voice echoing in the hallway. No words. No language. His legs were shaking. He was pushed up slightly on his toes as he pumped cum into Sherlock's hungry mouth and there was the slight sting of teeth but it was too late for complaining and then finally, it was over, it released him, he released Sherlock's hair with a gasp, his brain feeling starved for oxygen.  
  
"Oh my God," he whispered. "God _almighty_."  
  
Sherlock rocked back on his heels and looked up at John, smiling enigmatically.  
  
"You do realise that you blaspheme _constantly_ during sex," said Sherlock. "I like it. It's... cute."  
  
"What?"  
  
"The first time I heard you, I thought you were praying."  
  
"Oh..." John stopped himself saying 'oh God', but just barely.  
  
Sherlock stood up and steered John toward the bedroom. "All right. Now we can move."  
  
"Okay."  
  
The coat dragged the floor. It was really a relief to take it off now. Sherlock put it aside somewhere as John lay down on the bed, and John watched Sherlock undress with sleepy fascinated eyes.  
  
Sherlock dragged the covers down and they got in under them. John reached down Sherlock's body with a thought to reciprocating but Sherlock caught and held his hand.  
  
"Later," he said.  
  
John loved the idea of a casual 'later'. "All right," he said.  
  
They lay together for a while.  
  
"You really learned how to do that from the internet?" John said.  
  
"You'd be surprised how effective a little research plus careful observation of physical and vocal cues can be."  
  
"I wouldn't, actually." His arm was around Sherlock's neck now and he reeled him in for a kiss that went on and on.  
  
"John?"  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"When people assume we're a couple, the way they do..."  
  
John wondered where on earth this was going. It wasn't as though he planned his reflexive denials, that was why they were reflexive.  
  
"I'm still not going to say anything but I might... smile quietly to myself. Not on purpose, but I think it's likely. I thought I should warn you."  
  
"Okay. Thanks," John said in the most serious possible voice he could muster on the edge of laughter. "I'll be sure to keep that in mind."  
  
"You're laughing at me."  
  
"You're being funny. So yes. I guess I am."  
  
After that, Sherlock seemed restless and John wondered if he was getting bored. But though he got up and actually put something on, because it was cold, he came back with his laptop and sat beside John and started looking things up.  
  
The flickering light in his face had to be video. John did not want to look at the screen.  
  
"Please tell me you're not looking at porn."  
  
"I _prefer_ text, but some things aren't clear without illustration."  
  
"Oh."  
  
John started to feel just a bit curious as to what exactly Sherlock needed illustrated that wasn't clear from text.  
  
But not that curious.  
  
Instead he lay warm and sleepy and looked up at Sherlock's face as Sherlock watched and read things on the net, his pale eyes flicking and roving as he took in data.  
  
John pulled his pillow closer and leaned against Sherlock's hip and leg, helping himself to warmth and closeness. If Sherlock did not like it he was likely to just get up and move. But Sherlock neither moved away nor complained, just focussed on his screen.  
  
John's eyes were closed and he was just starting to drift when he felt Sherlock's hand on his head.  
  
He opened his eyes and looked up. Sherlock was still looking at the screen, typing and clicking with one hand, while the other stroked John's hair with slow, gentle fingers.  
  
John closed his eyes again, smiling a little.  
  
It _was_ nice. He could see why Sherlock liked it.  
  
When he woke up about an hour later, Sherlock was no longer beside him, but there were noises from the kitchen that sounded suspiciously like making-tea noises. Clinking. Kettle.  
  
John sat up, realised he was naked, remembered why, blushed pleasurably, and then remembered his clothes scattered in the hall.  
  
If he tried to go out there naked to get them then Mrs Hudson was practically _guaranteed_ to suddenly somehow be there, by teleport if that was what it took. Sherlock could sail past people naked as though it were nothing but John _couldn't_.  
  
Sherlock's dressing gown? Must be in the bathroom. Second best? Not here either. Must be in the hamper.  
  
Suddenly, having separate bedrooms was incredibly _awkward_. All John's clothes were upstairs. Except for the ones lying scattered out there.  
  
But as it turned out his paranoia was misplaced this time. Maybe she was staying clear after the noise earlier. This was fine. John was not in a hurry to try to look her in the eye - not till he'd at least had a cup of tea.  
  
***  
Mrs Hudson sits at Jane Turner's kitchen table and tries to fight the urge to smoke. There is a great big ashtray right here on the table and though Jane doesn't smoke, she doesn't mind it.  
  
"So how are yours?" asks Jane, and is clearly about to go on about hers without waiting for any answer. There's been adoption talk lately.  
  
"Carrying on like teenagers," says Emma, promptly and brightly. She feels proud of them really.  
  
"What?" says Jane, startled, "haven't yours been living together for years now? Off and on?"  
  
 _Off and on_. Only Jane could sum up a faked death and resurrection in such a casual way.  
  
"Not like this they weren't," says Mrs Hudson. "They sort of took a while."  
  
Jane collects owls and they are everywhere in her flat, especially the kitchen. Owl salt and pepper shakers, owl plates and owl coasters and owl tea cosy. Horrid ceramic owls stand in dusty ranks on shelves. Jane is very proud of them.  
  
"Well, what sort of carrying on, have you seen them? Or heard them? Or what? I hope you weren't listening at the vent."  
  
She hopes no such thing. Jane Turner would climb the side of her building with suction cups to peep in at the windows if she thought she'd have a nice view.  
  
"I didn't have to listen. At all. They must have been in the hall right in front of the door to the stairs! I think they may have heard it in Speedy's."  
  
"Front hall? Well." Jane's impressed. "Just didn't make it to the bedroom then I expect. Oh, maybe they've started taking that Viagra or something, that might account for it."  
  
Mrs Hudson takes out a cigarette and lights it without another thought.  
  
Jane says, "A bit awkward though, with the new one coming in downstairs. Hope she's not bothered by, well. That sort of thing."  
  
"Well, I did say there was a _nice couple of bachelors_ upstairs and then I winked. I think she got it."  
  
"And the horrible smell?"  
  
"I told her it was paint. It's gone now, anyhow."  
  
Jane can no longer be held back from the topic of the adoption drama upstairs with her married couple, and Emma lets it wash over her for a while while she smokes and drinks Jane's coffee. She doesn't want to tell any more details, anyway, Jane wouldn't appreciate it, Jane always mixes up which one of them is the doctor and furthermore can never remember that the doctor is the nice one.  
  
That's what makes it so _shocking_ , you sort of can imagine _Sherlock_ carrying on, but for _John_ to talk the way he did is just - well. Embarrassing, but in a nice way. She wouldn't like overhearing him talk to a woman like that - at her time of life - but it's different when it's Sherlock.  -Jane refers to him as 'the pretty one', though _that's_ not the right word for how Sherlock looks at _all_. So Emma doesn't choose to tell her about how he's been walking around naked a lot lately.  
  
It's nicer to overhear than any sort of fighting. She doesn't really mind it at all, and she's not here to complain to Jane Turner about the unseemly noise but to crow a little about how happy her boys are lately. Jane's are having a bad time, apparently, with their adoption agency. Emma feels privately lucky that she will not have to worry about _that_ sort of thing.  
  
John might want to get a dog sometime, though: she wouldn't be at all surprised. But it had better be a little dog, because she _knows_ she'll end up having to walk it for them.


	8. Chapter 8

From the desk Sherlock watches John walk, naked and silent, to snatch up his clothes where Sherlock scattered them in the hall. He seems to have forgotten locking the door against Mrs Hudson earlier. He looks as though he expects her to leap out at him like a ninja from impossible places.  
  
He looks nice. Naked. There's just the scar on his shoulder. No tattoos or anything else to interrupt the view of his skin, just John being completely John - or as completely John as John can be without some awful jumper on.  
  
In hopes of delaying this inevitability Sherlock says, "She's gone out, you're safe. Be as naked as you like."  
  
John makes a face while laughing, but he comes out to the sitting room as he is, still carrying his clothes. It is nice to see him naked in here, a space unaccustomed to such a sight. But he is obviously cold and starts to get dressed.  
  
Sherlock sighs. "I should have said, Be as naked as _I_ like."  
  
John's face at this is really most rewarding. Alas, however, it doesn't work. He still puts his clothes on. Including the jumper. It's one of the less awful ones, but still.  
  
It's dark now, the sun went down while John lay sleeping. Sherlock had liked sitting beside him until John started dreaming, but he was too restless then, so Sherlock moved in here.  
  
Not _all_ of his time has been spent in sex research, but admittedly it's gotten the lion's share of his attention today.  
  
Once John has had some tea and has lost his fear of the ninja Mrs Hudson so far as to unlock the door, Sherlock says,  "I want to order some takeaway."  
  
"Okay," says John, looking startled.  
  
"Tonight I want to do another experiment."  
  
"Oh."  
  
With John, expressing intentions as desires is usually successful. _I want to_ really means the same to Sherlock as _I'm going to_ , but they don't mean the same thing to John.  
  
"You mean with the orchids and the belladonna."  
  
"Yes, of course."  
  
"Do you have to?"  
  
"I want to."  
  
"Why??"  
  
"I want to _feel_ you. I want to feel _more_."  
  
"Oh..." John's gaze shifts and softens, he is remembering, his pupils grow as his face turns pink. "...Okay."  
  
He is going to do it anyway, but it's nicer when John feels like he has given permission.  
  
Later, food digested, showers taken, and several lengthy non sequitur kisses stolen in the hallway and the kitchen... Sherlock places the two bottles before him and raises his eyebrows at John.  
  
"Would you like to try it with me? Properly?"  
  
John slowly shakes his head No. Sherlock didn't expect a Yes, anyway. And it would have been an alteration of his experiment. But it seems rude not to offer.  
  
John is likely to kiss him, in any case, whatever he thinks about the matter.  He'll either forget, or forget to worry about it. And they will be together, and it will take _much_ less time to get John out of his pants, and Sherlock has done a lot of research since last time as well.  
  
Mrs Hudson _may_ lose some sleep. This is a shame but sadly unavoidable.  
  
Tincture. Drops. And the glass of water at the ready this time. He sits on the sofa, and John sits down beside him and casually reaches out to take his pulse, without a hint of apology or seeking of permission.  
  
Sherlock likes it.  
  
"How long does it take?" John seems to know to speak quietly. His voice is soft and warm against Sherlock's ears.  
  
"About... twenty minutes." His own voice is slow and thick as honey.  
  
John keeps command of Sherlock's wrist and his fingers keep the time as Sherlock's pulse slows and then races and then slows again. He mentions the expected symptoms as they appear, 'hot', 'floating', then, "Ugh," and John hands him the glass of water.  
  
John is thinking about earlier, the conclusion of their date. He has been thinking about it for hours. For some reason he liked wearing Sherlock's coat, and Sherlock hopes John will think about it more directly so Sherlock might understand why. Asking straight out does not work even though it _should_.  
  
He takes Sherlock's pulse again (he'd let go to give Sherlock the water) and now his touch glows neon with _desire, concern, resigned affection, love_.  
  
"You feel so many different things all at once."  
  
"Yeah, but I think that might have more to do with you than with me." _Rueful_ and _warm_.  
  
"I don't know. I don't care how you feel about anybody else."  
  
"Um." _Exasperated_. - Not good, apparently.  
  
"Oh you know what I MEAN," and he shoves the glass of water toward the coffee table and presses up against John, breathing him in, drinking him in, feeling all his annoyances dissolve into _enjoyment of attention_.  
  
When the doorbell starts ringing it is John's reaction to the sound, not the sound itself, that makes Sherlock understand. Long strident rings, one after another, interspersed with ringing Mrs Hudson's bell downstairs. John is thinking, Police, even as Sherlock hears Lestrade think to himself, _Christ he had better be in, where else can he be, come on!_  
  
"Shit," says John, "what bloody timing..."  
  
John goes down and answers the door, of course, he has to, and when Lestrade pounds up the stairs he is already talking as he comes in, "didn't answer texts and it can't wait, it's the - Bit dark in here, isn't it?"  
  
"Yes," says Sherlock, "it is, what do you want, Lestrade, we're busy."  
  
Lestrade is a bit sharper than Sherlock might have expected of him and looks back and forth between him and John with his eyebrows raised.  
  
 _Wondered about that, that's good, anyway thank Christ he's in._  
  
***  
  
John did not have enhanced senses but Lestrade's look was easy enough for anyone to read. He also saw the little mental shrug as Lestrade moved on to business and John relaxed suddenly. It wasn't a problem. It wasn't even a _thing_. Not to Lestrade, who had always been a decent sort anyway.  
  
But John's heart sank when he learned why the detective inspector had come.  
  
A car jacking that was a targeted kidnapping; not only kidnapping but child kidnapping; not only one child, but _five_ children, a set of identical quintuplets, nine-year-old girls. Both parents alive but badly injured and in terror.  
  
One girl found.  
  
"You remember about ten, twelve years ago?" asked Lestrade, his face haggard. He had children, John remembered. "Pairs of twins being murdered one at a time. And a set of triplets. The killer was never caught. The murders just stopped. But this, this looks a _lot_ like his work. So, Sherlock, sorry you're busy but I haven't got time to wait, I need you _now_ , I need your help getting this guy _fast_ \- before he kills the rest of those girls."  
  
John bit his lip.  
  
"That _is_ interesting," Sherlock said, without moving. "How was this one killed?"  
  
"We think asphyxiation... but... you'd really better come and see the scene for yourself."  
  
Sherlock still did not move. Was he listening to Lestrade's thoughts?  
  
" _Now_ , Sherlock! Four little girls - "  
  
"Fine."  
  
Sherlock got up. He was in lounging things, barefoot, and he'd have to change to street clothes. John wished _so much_ that Lestrade had come half an hour earlier. Thank God at least he hadn't given in and joined Sherlock in trying it, just to have the freedom to kiss at will.  
  
He _had_ thought about it.  
  
Lestrade watched Sherlock walk by, his unsteady steps as he went down the hall into the darkened bedroom and did not turn on the light.  
  
Quietly Lestrade said to John, "What's wrong with his pupils?"  
  
John hesitated, then said as quietly, though he knew Sherlock could hear them if he was listening, "He's - doing one of his experiments. Dilated pupils at night. Sort of thing."  
  
"Ohh. So that's why," Lestrade gestured around the nearly dark sitting room. "Blimey, for a minute there, thought I was - interrupting, you know, something."  
  
John shrugged, just as Sherlock shouted from the bedroom, "You were!"  
  
Lestrade looked embarrassed, but for once John didn't feel it himself. "Do you have your shades with you?" he asked, as he went to get his shoes and coat.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Sunglasses. Are they in your pocket?"  
  
"Er - yeah," Greg said, feeling in his coat.  
  
"He'll need to borrow them."  
  
It wasn't very much, but it was the best he could think of.  
  
Sherlock came back out, dressed, his eyes glittering black. "Go on, Lestrade, we'll follow, you know I won't ride in police cars."  
  
"You can ride with me. I didn't come in a police car."  
  
"Why not?" asked John, startled.  
  
"He didn't want any record of coming here." Sherlock took the sunglasses and put them on.  
  
They looked silly. Even with the coat. Mirrored sunglasses made him look like a character from a bad movie.  
  
"I can _hear_ you," Sherlock muttered as they went down the stairs after Lestrade.  
  
He told them about it in the cab - he told John, anyway, because what Sherlock did not deduce he could hear before it was spoken, and even for John it was extremely difficult to spot the difference.  
  
The girls had been stolen early that afternoon, but the parents had been so badly hurt when the killer took the van that he had a head start of several hours before anyone in the A &E could be made to understand what had happened.  
  
One of the girls was found this evening. They couldn't even tell exactly which one of the sisters she was - had been - because they were all identical and her clothes were long gone. Maybe the parents could tell, but not right now they couldn't.  
  
Dental records were difficult with children, John knew. They lost teeth even in the normal way.  
  
He felt sick.  
  
"You can both stop being so emotional," Sherlock said, in a voice so cold even John couldn't help reacting defensively to it. "Caring is one thing, but it's not helping anyone, and _none_ of them are _your daughter_ , Lestrade, just because they are the same age, get a hold of yourself."  
  
"What the fuck?" squeaked Lestrade, aghast.  
  
"Sherlock." John gave him a STOP IT look, but he could not read Sherlock's expression behind the mirrored glasses, could only see his own pale, angry face.  
  
The crime scene was a zoo of horrified onlookers. The girl was inside the building, but visible from the street, which was how she had been found so quickly after being dumped there.  
  
When Donovan saw them coming she said sharply to Lestrade, "oh Christ, tell me you didn't."  
  
"Obviously I did," he said shortly to her, and Sherlock ignored her completely. She glared at John, who was last walking by.  
  
"Save it," said John.  
  
They were almost all the way to the building when Sherlock stopped short. John almost collided with him. Lestrade kept walking a few paces, unaware.  
  
"Sherlock?"  
  
"Here." Sherlock was almost whispering. His voice was lost in the street noise.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Here. He's here, John. He's here watching..."  
  
***  
Sherlock turns slowly round, trying to ignore John's questions, trying not to even look at John because he's looking for something, someone else. The someone else on the fringe of the crowd who is _laughing on the inside_ while outwardly presenting the same shocked sad face as everyone else but Sherlock.  
  
There are so many people, so many slack jawed stupid people, their minds pinging with useless noise, but in this case the majority of them feeling the same way, _shocked sick sorrowful_ about the little girl, makes the one lone _laughing_ voice sound as loud as a rude noise at a funeral.  
  
The closer he gets to it, the easier it will be to catch. Sherlock plunges into the crowd, pushing past John who does not understand and there is no time to make him understand, he must find the laughter before it stops, before the laughing one realises he is being hunted, because he will, because he is.  
  
The man sees at last that someone is coming for him and he turns to run away. He is not young, and he is not such a challenge as some to chase and catch, except that even with Lestrade's absurd cop sunglasses on Sherlock's eyes are watering from the lights everywhere. Bits of neon splinter and refract in these involuntary tears.  
  
Voices behind him, calling "Sherlock!" He never answers. They will follow. John will follow. Always.  
  
The old man wheezes, "Help!" as Sherlock grabs him by the back of his coat. But there is no one near enough to hear or help him, and then Sherlock hears his thoughts flick to the knife in his pocket and the hand darts in to get it and Sherlock grabs the hand as it emerges and makes it drop the knife and then - even as he hears the blade clattering to the ground -  
  
drops the hand as though it is fire, as though it is acid, but it is too late, the damage is done in seconds, he touched that man and he could feel everything and it was vile, it was so profoundly disgusting that he staggers back, retching, a horrible sound emerging from his own mouth, a wail of rejection. No no no!  
  
 _Sherlock_ , John is saying somewhere, but Sherlock can't answer can't think can't breathe, he is doubled over vomiting on the ground and the black sky is spinning and the children, all those children touched by that.  
  
Someone is touching him, it's John, he needs John but he is foul and John must be protected, "Go away," he tries to say, but has to spit to clear his mouth and then he is coughing.  
  
There are police all around the old man, there is blood on him, Sherlock does not know how it got there, he cannot bear to look in his direction, he staggers back from the mess he's made, covers his eyes, the sunglasses are gone, they're lost, he never knows where or how. His eyes are tearing with the pain of the light but they are also streaming continuously and he is trembling, shaking. Crouching on the ground. Grinding his teeth.  
  
"Sherlock. Come on, please, please, Sherlock, I need you to help me now, come on."  
  
"I think he needs an ambulance," Lestrade says.  
  
"No. He needs to go home, come on, Sherlock. You're going to be all right, come on, home."  
  
"Seriously, what the hell is he on - "  
  
"Greg. We _found your bloody serial killer_ , go find out from _him_ where the other girls are and let me get Sherlock home!"  
  
John is in charge. John is protecting him. Sherlock doesn't want an ambulance.  
  
John's hand touches the back of Sherlock's neck. _You're going to be okay. I'll take care of you. Get up now. Come with me._  
  
Sherlock stumbles to his feet, and when John turns to lead him to the street and a cab he grabs for John's hand. John stiffens with surprise, and Sherlock knows it's because of all the people, not Lestrade so much but Donovan, and Anderson has appeared from inside the building. Everyone is staring. They don't understand how Sherlock knew who it was, but they never understand how he knows anything.  
  
 _Right, come on then_ , and John doesn't let go, but tugs Sherlock along as though holding his hand was John's idea, and Sherlock follows meekly with his eyes almost shut against the throbbing strobing lights of the police cars.  
  
The trip back to Baker Street is nightmarish. He is sick again, in the police car - John accepted a ride in one on his behalf, and Sherlock is not very sorry, all things considered, but John has to go and apologise for him too.  
  
John wants to put him to bed, but he won't go. He must brush his teeth. He must wash, he feels revolting. John hovers, his worry is palpable. He is thinking, _If I leave you to shower like this you'll fall down again._  
  
"Stay and help me," Sherlock says. His eyes are closed. He doesn't want to look at anything ever again.  
  
"Okay."  
  
It won't poison John just to touch Sherlock. The feelings only go in one direction. John was so right not to take the orchids and belladonna with him. If he could feel what Sherlock can still feel he would be vomiting forever.  
  
John is decent and good and he would never... he would never...  
  
"Agh! Jesus. Easy. All right, you're all right."  
  
John is _not happy_ about being thrown up on, but he isn't angry either. His feelings are _worried scared protective_ , but he is at least partially _calm_ , not panicking anyway because at least on the surface he does understand what has happened. He is vastly underestimating it of course, but he really is not to be blamed.  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
"Never mind, come on, shower, I need it now too. Come on, get up."  
  
"I want to die."  
  
"No you don't. Up."  
  
As he gets to his feet, shaking, leaning against John, Sherlock realises what a horrible horrible thing that was for him to say. To _John_. But John practically ignores it, doesn't take him seriously, thinks it is the sort of thing commonly said by nauseated people.  
  
John turns the water on, the pipes shrilling as always, and downstairs Sherlock can hear Mrs Hudson wake up and wonder what time it is.  
  
He sways as John undresses him, does nothing whatever to help, but for once John does not call him a lazy shit, John is focussed on getting him into the shower and Sherlock doesn't mind going but he can't bring himself to do anything to help. He just can't. He's shivering, and his empty stomach is throbbing like a wound.  
  
"Here. Lean on me. Lift up your foot. Step over."  
  
Sherlock gets into the tub and immediately sits down, hugging his knees. John sighs. "Good enough."  
  
John takes off his own clothes, which is for the best really, but there's not really enough room for him to get in now so he leans in from the side to help.  
  
"You're being a doctor now."  
  
"I'm _always_ a doctor. Same as you're always a detective, even when you're not on a case." He says it very gently.  
  
"Oh. I never thought of that," Sherlock mumbles into his knees.  
  
John aims the water from the shower spray so most of it lands on Sherlock's upper back. He is thinking that the hot water will relax clenched muscles, and though it's always a little vexing when his body works like anyone else's would, John is right and it does feel a little better, the shaking is less.  
  
John strokes Sherlock's hair, and rivulets of water course down around his neck.  
  
Slowly, experimentally, Sherlock opens his eyes. The bathroom light is off. He can clearly see John but John has to work in darkness. And it is work, Sherlock is sure it is. Being with him.  
  
He lets go of his knees, grips the sides of the tub and stands up. Beside the tub John stands up too, hands out as though he expects a fall at any time.  
  
"Get in," says Sherlock.  
  
John doesn't really get much benefit of the water, as Sherlock stands between him and it, but he holds him up without complaining, and manages at some point to introduce some soap suds, which are nice, and the smell is soothing. Clean is soothing. The shaking is almost gone.  
  
His stomach still feels bad, but no longer throbbing hot.  
  
"Don't kiss me," it occurs to him to say.  
  
John stifles a horrified laugh. "I wasn't really planning to."  
  
"I mean even after... I've brushed my teeth, don't."  
  
"Okay... why not?"  
  
"I don't ever want you to feel this."  
  
"That bad?"  
  
He can't answer. There just isn't any way. He can hear John thinking _This isn't like you_ , and he knows it, he's not offended, he would have been offended by the opposite supposition.  
  
But it is not the sort of thing John supposes, either. Sherlock did not experience, did not know anything of what the victims felt. It's the victims John is thinking about but that isn't the point at all. Not... not directly.  
  
It was the _belief_ he felt, the pure _certainty_ that the killer was doing the right thing, that it was so obvious he was doing the right thing. It had a clarity as complete and perfect as an equation but it was wrong. It was sickeningly wrong.  
  
The belief in the soul is a common enough thing, even John has it, but in the man Sherlock caught and touched tonight, this belief had evolved its own certainty that multiple identical children of however many numbers greater than one do not have complete souls, that the only way to reunify them is to kill them all. Nobly twisted, in its way, but proceeding from this was the certainty that whatever one wanted to do to these incomplete beings in the meantime was wholesome and sanctioned by God. A little bonus.  
  
And he's so _sure_ he's _right_.  
  
But he _cannot_ be right.  
  
And Sherlock wasn't expecting anything like it and it's sickening to him, all the way down to the core, just wrong. Wrong. WRONG.  
  
"Right, that's enough, okay? Come on. Out. Dry off. Bed. Let's go."  
  
"Now you're the Captain." That authoritative, rank-pulling tone. Sherlock likes it, but he likes it best when it is being used on somebody else.  
  
"I'm always a Captain." John turns the water off and then Sherlock really does have to get out and seek towel and clothing. He wants to be covered, he wants to be bundled up in everything he owns.  
  
"John I'm tired."  
  
"Yeah. Me too."  
  
He is in his bed now curled up tightly and John is beside him and this time Sherlock is on the side by the door - probably to better reach the bathroom if he's sick again. John is stroking his hair.  
  
"You're going to be okay," John is saying, for what must be the dozenth time. Sherlock closes his eyes tightly, so tight they hurt.  
  
Not going to be okay. He is sure of that. He is not going to be able to delete this, some things can't be deleted, in fact most of the worst things can't. He's never told John this, because that would lead to questions about what sort of things are the worst things.  
  
 _You're shaking_. "Are you cold?"  
  
No. "Yes."  
  
What a liar Sherlock is, it's so easy, always been so easy.  
  
"Sherlock."  John tries, with gentle hands, to get him to uncurl, to turn around, but Sherlock can't seem to do it, so John lies down behind him, pressed against Sherlock's back, and puts his arm over top. It isn't comfortable for John. The angle of his arm is awkward. But the warmth of John's body pressed up behind him is so precious. John rearranges his arm after a bit, resting it on Sherlock's hip.  
  
"John?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"What happened after I touched him?"  
  
John goes tense against his back. He was not expecting this question. "You - knocked the knife out of his hand. None of us could see the knife until then. But then you pulled back and doubled over and he picked the knife up again and was going for the back of your neck."  
  
There are fierce pulses of _protective righteousness_ coming from John as he relives this in the telling. Sherlock can feel his heart speed up, too.  
  
"When you doubled over like that I thought he must have stabbed you in the gut," John said. "There wasn't any blood on the knife but I didn't have time to notice that."  
  
"You're the one that hit him," Sherlock said, remembering the blood on the man as the police surrounded him.  
  
"Cut him. Yeah."  
  
"Oh," says Sherlock.  
  
There is quiet for some time. John gives up trying to rest his arm anywhere comfortably, and slowly rubs Sherlock's back.  
  
"Think you can sleep now?"  
  
"Hmm."  
  
***  
It wasn't that simple, of course. Sherlock did fall asleep but woke up again within the hour, screaming hoarsely. John came running in from the kitchen, where he'd been trying to find something, anything to eat. He'd been contemplating invoking the mercy of Mrs Hudson for at least some crisps or biscuits, weighing this against the necessity of making at least partial explanations to her as to what has happened to Sherlock... then there were the screams. John ran to them even knowing what they were and knowing he could do nothing to help.  
  
Whatever Sherlock had felt touching that crazy man, it was haunting Sherlock's dreams the way the war haunted John's. If anyone knew what it was like to wake up that way, it was John. God knew.  
  
He ran down the hall into the bedroom, leaving the refrigerator door hanging open behind him, and found Sherlock sitting up wild eyed, clutching at the covers as though he didn't know what they were.  
  
"John?" he said wildly as John came in. John only just restrained himself from turning on the light.  
  
"Yes, it's me. You all right?"  
  
"I don't know," as petulant as any complaint of boredom he had ever made. "I was sleeping. Where is he?"  
  
"Who?"  
  
"That man! Who do you think!"  
  
"The police have him."  
  
"Where were you?"  
  
"In the kitchen."  
  
A silence.  
  
"You okay?" John tried after a minute.  
  
"I said I don't know!"  
  
"Okay," and John turned to leave him alone.  
  
"WHY ARE YOU LEAVING ME," Sherlock shouted, and John ducked as though something had been thrown at his head.  
  
"I thought you wanted me to - "  
  
"DON'T!"  
  
And John was poised to shout back now, because he hated to be shouted at, but some note in the voice alerted him since he couldn't see the face. He didn't know what Sherlock looked like as a small child, at four, maybe, or five or six, but he thought maybe he had an idea what he sounded like (adjusting for changing of voice).  
  
Without another word to invite argument, John climbed into the bed and just put his arms around Sherlock and tried not to feel too shocked when he realised Sherlock was actually crying.  
  
"I can feel you trying not to feel shocked." The voice was surly and thick with tears.  
  
"I'm _surprised_. You have to be able to understand that."  
  
"It isn't like I don't feel things."  
  
"I know."  
  
Sherlock took a shaking breath as though to say something else, but whatever it was, he didn't say it. Maybe he expected John to be able to hear it anyway, but John couldn't. All he could do really was let Sherlock cry on him. And cry. And cry.  
  
You would _think_ tears a nicer thing to be soaked with than sick, and that is true, but tears are commonly accompanied by snot, which made the comparison something of a wash.  
  
A bit like a kid, but larger, so there was more of everything. If the belladonna was still present in Sherlock's tears (or snot), John devoutly hoped it didn't absorb through the skin. It didn't.  
  
After another hour or so, Sherlock fell deeply asleep and John felt reasonably sure he would stay that way for some time. Extricating himself from Sherlock's grip and the bed, he nearly ran for the shower, stripping out of his clothes and shuddering at the cold slimy jumper that he didn't really ever want to see again, much less wear.  
  
Lestrade called the next day - or later on the same day, really.  
  
"How is he?"  
  
"All right," cautiously. "Sleeping right now. The girls? You found them, they're all right?"  
  
"Yeah. Yeah, thanks to him, how the _hell_ he just whipped around and fingered the bastard like that, it's uncanny. But that's just him, isn't it? Just what he does."  
  
"Are you in trouble for bringing him in on it?"  
  
There was a pause. "Not much," Lestrade said evasively, "but he's not the only one causes trouble, is he," and John winced as Lestrade rang off.  
  
John was eating his half of the lunch Mrs Hudson had brought up in return for some explanation of why Sherlock was sick in bed. A scuffle with a serial killer was no surprise to Mrs Hudson, and she certainly didn't need to know any more than that. She was diverted anyway by the talk of the killer, she remembered the news about it when he'd been killing twins and triplets in London years before.  
  
She said an odd thing while they were talking about it.  
  
"Isn't it awful for them," she sighed, putting down her sandwich. "Identical twins and so on. Aren't they special enough? Isn't that hard enough? And in a way everyone can see on the outside. It just isn't fair."  
  
He didn't take much note of it while she was there but after she'd gone back downstairs with the tray, John turned it over in his mind. The idea of it being hard to be special in a way that could be seen. Sherlock was like that, wasn't he. He did disguises sometimes but he could never hide being special and didn't want to. And Mycroft was like that too, in his own way. John's mental image of Mycroft would always be of him in that creepy garage leaning on his umbrella looking mysterious, which was exactly what Mycroft wanted, and John knew it. He would always be Potential Supervillain first, and Flatmate's Brother only after that.  
  
Sherlock slept such a long time that it worried John a bit, but there was no more screaming, at least. There was no doubt that he needed the rest. John found things to do around the flat until he could find nothing else; unwilling to go out, he tried to read; unable to read, he returned to the bedroom and lay beside Sherlock and listened to him breathe until he fell asleep himself.  
  
One of the war dreams, bad enough anytime, but this time truly horrible, because Sherlock was in it, and Sherlock was _never_ in the war dreams. It must have been because he was there beside John in real life. Or maybe it was because he really had thought Sherlock had been stabbed with that nasty big knife the old man had. Or both. And there was always the staring eyes and the blood spreading out around his head, fake though they turned out to be, real enough to feed John's dreams forever.  
  
But when he woke sweating and saw Sherlock there beside him, passed out but entirely alive, the rush of relief was so intense and so sweet it was like sex, the more so when he lay back panting, riding it out till he was calm again.  
  
These were old dreams now, even with the new twist. Even so the dreams always held John very tight in their grip - that was why he made fists in his sleep so often - but then once they let go, they let go.  
  
He was awake now though.  
  
Sherlock looked better, but he had to be dehydrated (after all that) and John shook him awake and made him drink some water. Sherlock did so without complaint, which meant he wasn't himself again yet, so John let him lie back down to sleep some more while he went to call for takeaway.  
  
Sherlock was quiet for a couple of days following that. Not _silent_ , but quiet. He didn't bother correcting people on television, he didn't post anything on his web site, he didn't even use his computer (or John's). He used his phone when he wanted to look things up, he ignored texts from his brother and from Lestrade, and he ignored John.  
  
No, not entirely ignored. But he didn't touch. And even though it was such a new thing between them John was already used to it and he missed it. But the possibility of rejection was paralysing. So he waited, and hoped Sherlock would get to missing it too.  
  
But two nights passed in his own bed and Sherlock did not come up, though John left the door unlocked the first night and then open the second night, and when he came down he found Sherlock had closed his bedroom door, and again, he just couldn't face being told to get out.  
  
So he went back upstairs and this time, for once, when he got off thinking about Sherlock sucking his cock, it was a _memory_ and not a fantasy and he didn't feel ashamed of it at all. He knew Sherlock was not listening, hadn't taken his flowers and poisons and could not hear John, because if he had been listening he would have been up here before John had finished. He would have. He _would_ have, because John was thinking, as clearly as he could while touching himself, _Get up here, Sherlock, come on, need you, need you, get up those stairs and lie down with me and let me touch you, get up here now and let me suck you._  
  
If he didn't come up, then he didn't hear it. And if he didn't hear it it was because he was _deaf_.  
  
On that following day John woke up with the certainty that he had had enough.


	9. Chapter 9

Sherlock looks up from his phone when John taps him on the knee. It's the first time they've touched since three days ago and he has held himself back from John because John has been holding back from him. John thought, therefore John _thinks_ , that Sherlock is like a _child_ and it is so embarrassing to have cried on him and the experiment will have to be abandoned.  
  
They'll just have to go back to the way things were.  
  
So when John taps him Sherlock looks up with a frosty you're-interrupting expression, which changes immediately when he sees what John tapped him with.  
  
The orchid tincture bottle. In his other hand, John has the bottle with the belladonna. He'd let John see where he kept them last time.  
  
"No, I don't want to," Sherlock says, and is starting to look back at his phone when John says,  
  
"I've already taken some. So you may as well."  
  
John sets the bottles down in front of Sherlock on the coffee table and goes to the dimmer switch on the floor lamp, turning it down very low. His pupils are already starting to dilate.  
  
"I saw how much you took. I took a little less. Definitely working now."  
  
It is... it is _useful_ to see it taking effect on someone else.  
  
"You've had something to eat?" he asks sharply. John nods, goes to the kitchen and gets a glass of water. Then he gets a second one.  
  
"I haven't," Sherlock snaps at this presumption, but John shakes his head.  
  
"Unless we have scone-stealing mice all of a sudden, you've eaten _three_ since Mrs Hudson brought them this afternoon. You're fine."  
  
Sherlock scowls, until John adds, "You're gonna let _me_ hear _you_ , but _you_ won't be able to hear _me_? Fine, I don't mind an unfair advantage for once," and when he puts it like _that_... Well.  
  
He takes his preparation with as bad grace as he can muster, but this is one of those moments when John takes charge, and Sherlock has to admire that, if silently.  
  
"You shouldn't have done this," he says to John as they sit side by side on the couch, waiting.  
  
John makes a rude noise.  
  
"I mean it, there was a reason I stopped, did that not occur to you."  
  
"Course it did. And I didn't agree with it. And you decided all by yourself, so I did too. So. ...There."  
  
Sherlock could think of no better response to this than "You sound impaired."  
  
"Really!"  
  
Even as Sherlock is frowning in irritation at the sarcastic tone - he hates sarcasm being used by anyone other than himself - John's touch on his wrist blows Sherlock's irritation away like cobwebs. Warm and steady, even impaired: John, feeling his pulse. The near-dark room seems brighter and brighter as his eyes yield to the belladonna and open up wide.  
  
At his side, John too seems brighter and brighter. His presence is always bigger than his body, Sherlock realises now. It's so _obvious_ now. John actually is luminous. It just means something different than Sherlock meant when he said it before. Something much more important.  
  
John's dark blue eyes are almost totally swallowed up now by the darkness of his pupils. It is an interesting change in the familiar face. Sherlock leans close to stare and they are like mirrors facing each other, reflecting infinitely.  
  
"I think," he says carefully, enunciating every word for fear of being told that he too now sounds impaired, "the effects... are more intense this time."  
  
"Yeah," John says, and laughs.  
  
Soon they need the water, and after a little their voices begin to echo in each other's heads. John leans against him. _You made me do this, I hated not being touched._  
  
 ** _I did not make you do this._**  
  
 _You included me in it and you can't just stop. I don't want to be apart anymore God damn it._  
  
 ** _I didn't want you to feel what I -_**  
  
 _Don't be stupid. I felt it already just watching you suffer._  
  
John pulls away and Sherlock feels as though he is being punished for something, but all John is doing is going to the door and locking it. John is almost _Victorian_ sometimes, in some ways, like a throwback or a time traveller. It's their own flat and they can do what they like in it whenever they like.  
  
 _I know you think it's funny to parade around in front of her, but I want us to be alone that's all._  
  
 ** _I don't think it's funny, it IS funny, it's very funny. She -_**  
  
Then John is touching him again, on his hand, and in the rush of John's feelings, whatever Sherlock was thinking about Mrs Hudson is immediately forgotten. He is only teasing John, anyway. He isn't 'parading around' for Mrs Hudson's benefit at all, but for John's. Obviously.  
  
 _You're a bad man_. But there's a terrible _fondness_ to it.  
  
John has his hand, but is tugging at it: John wants him to get up. "Where are we going, just come here," Sherlock says lazily.  
  
"Up," says John. _Upstairs with me._  
  
 _Why upstairs?_  The bed is bigger in the bedroom down here.  
  
 _Because I don't want to have to worry about being quiet._  
  
"This is a good reason."  
  
 _Upstairs!_  
  
It becomes a race. Conclusion of which: John reaches the top of the stairs first, but Sherlock gets his long arms round John's waist and hauls him backwards before he can get through the door, turning to back through it so that Sherlock is first into the room. Technically he wins the race! Though as he lets go of John, John says, "I was racing to the top of the stairs, you brat." He is claiming to have won.  
  
Even when John calls him names in frustrated annoyance they sound like endearments. Unless he is actually shouting, 'lazy shit' is almost a caress. Sherlock used to take it as an affront, way back when, but not for a long time now.  
  
" _Someone_ needs to take their clothes off as forfeit. If we don't know who won then we both have to."  
  
"Okay." _Good enough reason to do what I want to do anyway._  
  
John has not even finished taking his own things off before he's hurrying Sherlock out of his, and this results in more grappling, which is fun, and they stagger to John's bed which Sherlock is now already starting to think of as 'the upstairs bed'.  
  
" _Pants_ , John..." **_Why on earth can you not seem to part with your precious pants..._**  
  
 _Sorry, Your Majesty._  
  
The light is off, of course, but that doesn't matter to either of them, there is more than enough to see by, and they can feel so much, so much more than last time, and they are _they_ so much more than last time, because they're each under the influence of  the active compounds to the same degree. Whereas before it had been good, nearly enough, now they are each fully under the influence of the other, attuned to the other. The way it should be.  
  
John takes his pants off and Sherlock makes him take his socks off too this time,  
  
 _but the floor is cold,_  
  
 ** _so stay off the floor._**  
  
When Sherlock chooses to be naked, that means completely naked, including bare feet. Obviously. It is disconcerting to reach down with one's bare feet and feel socks. It just is.  
  
 _My feet get cold, it's not a character flaw._  
  
The emotions coming from John no longer feel like exterior data. They do not come _at_ Sherlock the way they seemed to before, they come _through_ him. Harder to classify but easier to comprehend. Impossible to keep out.  
  
 _God how you think, think, think all the time, you hum like a wasp's nest. What are your dreams like?_  
  
 ** _Boring, pointless. Like anyone's, surely. Except once.  I fell asleep at the microscope. That was good. I dreamed about pollens._**  
  
John breaks up into laughter. Out loud, and inside his head. It feels warm, _rueful fond admiring_ , but _amused_.  
  
"I'm completely serious," says Sherlock, mystified.  
  
 _I know!_  
  
Sherlock doesn't understand why John is laughing at him exactly, and he really ought to be able to now. But he can feel perfectly well that the laughter is loving and not at all at his expense. John thinks he is amazing, brilliant, and _sexy_.  
  
 ** _You do?_**  
  
 _Obviously..._  
  
 ** _Moriarty called me that._**  
  
 _Moriarty had some obvious ISSUES. Glad you couldn't hear the things he said in my ear before he sent me out to you._  
  
Because John is thinking about them directly, he can.  
  
It is a bit of a cold water moment.  
  
 ** _Ugh._**  
  
 _I know. Sorry. You're the one brought him up._  
  
That is true, Sherlock doesn't even know why he did that. He was embarrassed and it had bubbled up in his mind, another time he'd been confused by the word. The new information from John attaches further anxiety to it. The threats Moriarty had made to get John to do as he was told were specific, nightmarish, brutally sexual in nature and entirely directed against Sherlock. John even suspects, though he tries to hide the thought from Sherlock, that Moriarty had been getting off while talking to him then, from the urgent sound of his voice as it whispered in John's ear.  
  
It is awful, it is something he will not be able to delete, and he turns away, stumbling up from the bed, but John catches at him without even touching him, strong and steady, this is John who jumped onto that monster's back after hearing all that and risking his own death to try to destroy him. It isn't the threat against himself. It is the damage done to John. The thought of hearing such threats made, the thought of anyone doing such things to John makes him cold and sick.  
  
 _Fuck him anyway._ Forceful. Impatient.   _He's dead, he lost, you're mine. Come back here._  
  
John... has _also_ had to touch a serial killer and absorb his poison. No wonder he understands it. He does understand it.  
  
 _Come back and let that go for now._  
  
Sherlock  comes back to the bed.  
  
"Finally," John says out loud, and it's fascinating, the differences and samenesses between the voice of his thoughts and his audible voice. _I tried to lure you up here last night, but you couldn't hear me._  
  
 ** _Lure me?_**  
  
 _Yeah. In case you were doing the orchids and all I thought at you._ And in illustration John touches himself, and Sherlock catches his breath both at his ability to feel this and at the sensation itself. _Told you to get up here, told you I'd suck you._  
  
Sherlock laughs aloud. "You'd never do that."  
  
John sits up suddenly, and he is Not Happy. _I am NOT_.... Even inside his head he struggles for words to frame his outrage, _Bad in bed!_  
  
 ** _What?_**  
  
John is so _annoyed upset defensive_ that his thoughts stumble just like his speech does at moments like these - if there ever has been a moment like this.  
  
 _Bad in bed means selfish, what it means - just because I - anything I would ask for I mean, I don't know about all your research lately - anything you're willing to do that I want too - like I would do less!_  
  
 ** _I didn't mean it like that._**  
  
 _How else can it possibly - what else can it possibly mean?_  
  
 ** _You're attaching a lot of meaning to it... I just thought you wouldn't want to. Is it something you think about...?_**  
  
 _No_ , John admits. _It hasn't been. But I don't feel like it's right if you do everything, all the - work._  
  
 ** _Work?_**  
  
Sherlock feels glee and mischief working together in him now. John sputtering about sex is always a little bit fun just for its own sake and always has been.  
  
 ** _Is it work?_** Sherlock turns John onto his back and climbs on top of him. **_Work for you or for me? Or does it depend on what we do?_**  
  
 _I didn't mean it like that..._  
  
 ** _I've always liked work._** He nuzzles John's face, carefully not biting him though he would still very much like to.  
  
John is trying very hard not to laugh. Then he takes a deep breath and says, softly but aloud, "What you're willing to do, I'm willing to do. That's just how it is." _Whatever else I am or am not, I am not selfish._  
  
 ** _No, you're not, of course you're not, but John, I wouldn't care if you were. Be selfish. Or at least, don't keep score. Just... let me..._**  
  
John sighs. Then he sighs again in a different way as Sherlock leans down and kisses his throat and then gives in to a little biting after all.  
  
He is attuned to John, completely, he is unable to hear any other voices around them though there must surely be someone still awake, it is not so late an hour. He hears and feels John and that is exactly what he wanted all along.  
  
He lies down on top of John and they gasp as they rub together, and Sherlock is rewarded with John's _happiness_ at doing something mutually pleasurable, forgetting that right now, together, anything they do that gives either of them pleasure will become mutually pleasurable. That's all right. The happiness is also rewarding in its own special way, and he kisses John's mouth as they thrust and bump together, uncoordinated but not minding, panting and murmuring, "that's nice," and "wait - " and "yeah."  
  
It's nothing like as special as some of the things he's learned about, but Sherlock has allocated a section in his Mind Palace for long term plans of this sort. There is no point horrifying John with a catalogue of sexual activities all at once  when, properly introduced one at a time at reasonable intervals, they should offer years of interesting variety. Besides, it is more often the terminology than the concepts that horrify John, so, the less said, or explicitly thought, the better.  
  
But even the simple things feel good. Kissing in and of itself could have been enough if John truly hadn't wanted more. But he did want more and he wants more now.  
  
"I want to suck you," and he deliberately says it out loud, knowing the effect will be the greater for it, feeling John's whole skin react to the words. "Let me." He does not say Please. His breathing is harsh sounding in his ears. And John's ears.  
  
"God, yes. Please," John just has to say it, polite somehow even while blaspheming, and then he cries out when Sherlock fastens his mouth on him, and he was so right to make Sherlock come upstairs because it is so good when John doesn't care how loud his voice is.  
  
"Ah! God! God - yes - " his fingers digging hard into Sherlock's hair, "Jesus Christ, suck me, oh fuck yes," And Sherlock knows why he is babbling like this, the intensity of it, the echoes of pleasure, he can feel what it feels like to John, he can feel what he is doing and how good it is, and they are one as they pleasure each other and feel each other's pleasure and it turns around and around. Hot tight hungry throbbing and thrusting, licking and sucking, even that feels good, it feels good to do it, and John is babbling deliriously, "Sherlock oh Jesus you're so fucking beautiful make me come make me come oh my God," and Sherlock is trembling, ejaculating all over the sheets between John's legs even as John's coming in his mouth, they are one in two parts, they are one, all the time. But especially now.  
  
***  
That was only the beginning of a long and delirious night.  
  
It was very different, taking the stuff himself instead of just taking a little from Sherlock's mouth. That had had a profound enough effect but this... this was even more intense than John expected.  
  
He long ago resigned himself to having no secrets, living with Sherlock - well, he _had_ thought he had _one_. But even that was no secret anymore (such as it ever was). And so the total invasion of any privacy he ever had was not so shocking to John as it might have been to some theoretical other person.  
  
 _We were a couple long before we ever had sex,_ he realised, and everyone who ever thought they were had not made any mistake, whether or not they enjoyed his defensive reactions. Sherlock had been fine with being a couple that didn't sleep together, but John always resisted that label because to him, being a couple _did_ mean sleeping together. Of course it did.  
  
Sherlock accepted this definition for his sake. It hadn't been Sherlock's idea. It really hadn't. But it was now, it genuinely was. Sherlock was not the sort of person to humour anyone else for one second longer than it suited him to do so. He was doing what he wanted to do - of course he was, what else did he do. And what he wanted was John, and once he understood John's wants he wanted those things too. Just like that. Problem? he'd say. And John would have to say, No. Not a problem.  
  
 _It's not a problem; it's a fucking miracle._  
  
 ** _Hmm?_**  
  
"Sorry if I woke you."  
  
"A little. Don't care. Want more?"  
  
John had to laugh. "Maybe in a bit. I'm not eighteen anymore you know." He would have added 'neither are you', but Sherlock might in fact still be eighteen in that sense. He didn't know yet.  
  
 ** _I don't know your usual refractory period yet but whatever it is, I submit that this evening is not usual._**  
  
"You're right about that."  
  
"Don't talk." ** _Say it in my head. ...I like it._**  
  
 _You're right about that. And I like it too._  
  
 ** _You do?_**  
  
 _Just said so. Thunk so. Something. Yes._  
  
 ** _You like my voice._**  
  
 _Am I not praising you enough lately? You know I do, don't you?_  
  
 ** _My wanting more praise doesn't mean you don't praise enough. I might just be greedy._**  
  
 _Guess that's true. I love your voice. And your thinking voice is pretty much the same._  
  
They fell silent then for a while, drowsing comfortably. John leaned his head against Sherlock's head. Outside the muted traffic noises went on, the city was never truly quiet even at this time of the morning.  
  
Sherlock dozed off for a little while: John, fascinated, felt it happen. He was still there, they were still touching, physically and otherwise, but the feel of him definitely changed, and John remembered the time Sherlock fooled him, pretending to be asleep and then pretending a little harder, and knew he couldn't fool him now, not like this.  
  
Thinking of that, he indulged himself in stroking Sherlock's hair, a pleasure he missed in the last few days. One of several. You could get so used to miracles. You could get spoiled. It wasn't as though it was something he could just reach up and do, it was a thing to be done when one didn't have to reach. A long slow process to be enjoyed, and not in public.  
  
Sherlock sleeping, as opposed to Sherlock awake, was a strangely gentle tangle of soft murmuring... those boring dreams he complained of, maybe. Or maybe he was not even dreaming yet: John didn't think he was. It was just the sound of his mind when he was asleep. It was like an aviary full of a thousand birds of all different exotic species, all asleep: quiet but not silent. Alive but at rest.  
  
There was a time when he thought Sherlock was dead, dead in front of him, his head cracked open and all those birds scattered free into nothingness. A long time that John had to think that. And he had been so angry about it, because Sherlock came back like it was nothing and tricked John with a stupid disguise and just didn't seem to understand somehow that what he'd done had hurt - because it was necessary, because it was false, it was of no account.  
  
He'd been so angry about it, angry enough to write angry things that he knew Sherlock would find because Sherlock found everything, because there were never secrets with Sherlock, it was just something you had to learn to do without. And all the more so now. But what was there to hide now? What was left? What did it matter anymore? He had had something to be angry about once, but Sherlock understood now - not just from reading, either, that hadn't worked. He felt it now, and he'd explained more of his side and John didn't want to be angry about it anymore, or really about anything (within reason.) Sherlock was alive again, but no one lived forever, not even the cleverest man in the world. All lives ended. They sought out danger for pleasure. You just never knew.  
  
So there just really wasn't time to be angry anymore. Or to worry unduly. Or to mind too much when some of the waitresses at Speedy's gave him a certain kind of sidelong grin and asked after Sherlock. In fact when Mandy tried it on, he'd looked her right in the eye and said with a smile "He's brilliant," so that she got embarrassed.  
  
But he was still not okay with Mrs Hudson barging in on them to satisfy her prurient curiosity.  
  
Sherlock was dreaming now, he could tell. The interesting bit was, Sherlock seemed to be dreaming about sex. His cock was standing hard and his lips were parted and that dreamy look on his face was just utterly fucking delicious.  
  
 _What are you dreaming?_  he wondered.  
  
 ** _Johhhhhn._**  
  
It startled him to be answered, but it was a good answer.  
  
John reached out and put his hand on the hot shaft, slid his fingers up to encircle the head, and watched Sherlock's face as he swam up toward consciousness. He could feel a faint echo of it in his own body, and that echo got stronger as Sherlock came closer to being awake.  
  
He hesitated for a few seconds, but then he leaned down and tried it: opened his mouth and tasted the head of it, took it in, felt it against his tongue, and realised that there really was a part of him that sort of expected the roof to crack open and the heavens to open up and the whole world to stare in at John Watson willingly sucking another man's cock.  
  
Of course, the only people that really cared about this were the ones in the room.  
  
Sherlock woke up to it, John felt when it happened, and his confusion sharpened rather quickly into _shocked interest_ , a curious hybrid emotion that was just so Sherlock.  
  
 ** _you are... molesting me in my sleep?_** and if it weren't for the teasing tone, John would have been abashed and stopped what he was doing, but if there were the least doubt about mental tone, Sherlock's hand on his head is clearly approving.  
  
 ** _I am impressed with you. Don't stop. It feels good. Do it more._**  
  
 _Impressed?_ but it wasn't as though he didn't understand what Sherlock meant by it. He'd already made his point about not minding if John were to be selfish, but John would mind, he did mind. And with this as a given Sherlock was not inclined to protest any further.  
  
"John..."  
  
Oh, how good it was to hear his voice like that. Saying his name. John didn't mean to call on God and Jesus and so on while he was in bed, it just happened, it was the sort of thing that he always said, aloud or silently, when pleasure took him. But Sherlock just called on John.  
  
There was something really good about that.  
  
He didn't think he was doing particularly well at it, but then, the recipient had never had anyone else do it before, so at least he would not suffer by comparison.  
  
Sherlock tugged at John's hair as best he could, and moaned aloud. **_Think less, suck more._**  
  
He had to laugh a little, around his mouthful, he just couldn't help it. _Yes Your Majesty._  
  
And he was moaning now as he complied with the peremptory demand because he could feel it, really feel it, he could feel what he was doing as though it were being done to himself, as though he were big or flexible enough for one of those extraordinary feats that he could not manage himself despite numerous teenaged attempts.  
  
No, now he could feel what he did though he did it to a completely separate body, as though both their bodies were his.  
  
 ** _Or both mine. Don't stop. Oh John._**  
  
Tight and hot. His own mouth. Wet and hungry and tongue flickering over sensitive spots and his hand tightening at the base and Sherlock was moaning and throbbing and so was he.  
  
"John yes please yes more yes yes Johnnn," and then Sherlock's warm hand was sliding up John's thigh as John knelt there beside him and he was touching John's cock, thumb rubbing lazily over the slick weeping head and the doubled sensations - of Sherlock's body and of his own - were more than he could bear. It triggered them both almost instantly, and completely in unison, crying out - John's voice muffled and Sherlock's loud, echoing in the upstairs bedroom, "John."  
  
"Sex is messy," Sherlock remarked a little while later. "A constant battle with fluids."  
  
John snorted and butted his head against Sherlock's ribs. "Says the man who drips belladonna in his eyes so that it makes him hypersalivate. Says the man with the horrible smelling experiments and the bloody orchids all over everywhere."  
  
"The orchids aren't messy. They just don't smell like ordinary boring flowers."  
  
"Clearly, they're _not_ ordinary boring flowers."  
  
"No, they aren't."  
  
They were just talking, not thinking to each other. John wondered if the effects were wearing off. The thought made him a little sorrowful.  
  
If it was wearing off, it wasn't wearing off all at once. The orchids tapered off first, the belladonna took longer.  
  
But his sense of time was distorted. It _wasn't_ wearing off yet. Sherlock had simply been talking aloud to hear his own voice.  
  
 ** _This is the best possible time to mention my research._**  
  
 _Is it though?_  
  
 ** _Yes, you're in a good mood because we've been having sex, and you can't run off upstairs because we already are upstairs._**  
  
 _Okay..._  
  
 ** _And we're not speaking aloud. That helps you relax. You worry deep down about being overheard, especially since Moriarty bugged the flat that time, (you know) you worry about Mrs Hudson, you worry about Mycroft._**  
  
 _Thought we were talking about sex._  
  
 ** _We are. But not out loud. You sucked my cock before, did you like it? I think you liked it._**  
  
The suddenness of it was shocking but John did not recoil, proving the point right there. _Yes. Of course it helped that I could feel it too._  
  
 ** _But you didn't expect that._**  
  
 _No._  
  
John wasn't bothered by this line of questioning so far. They lay together on the least besmirched area of the bed, John on his back and Sherlock up along his side, not unlike that first time on the sofa, only there was just a bit more room and his leg was not asleep.  
  
And they were naked. And Sherlock was whispering into his mind,  
  
 ** _Do you want to fuck me?_**  
  
"Before you answer," Sherlock said aloud, "I preemptively absolve you of your absurd rule about selfishness."  
  
 ** _Besides... you'd feel it too, wouldn't you? Only this time you would expect it. So factor that in._**  
  
 _Jesus._  
  
"That's something of an answer in and of itself," Sherlock said, and he was pleased, both at John's unconcealable interest and at the blasphemy. "But first!" sitting up, "I want a cup of tea, I want the caffeine and sugar; I want most of the rest of those scones; and I want to change to the other bed because this one is dirty now." Without waiting for any reply he got up and marched naked to the bedroom door and started down the stairs.  
  
John rolled to the edge of the bed and swayed to his feet, unable not to follow.  
  
He hadn't known what Sherlock was going to suggest, apart from some encyclopaedic list of esoteric acts that only the internet could provide (complete with helpful definitions when necessary). He'd been a little worried there might be some mention of a riding crop, if only because Sherlock already had one. But did John want to...? Oh God yes, he did. _Yes I do, yes I do, yes I do,_ the rhythm of it in his head as he went down the stairs, naked, in pursuit of Sherlock and tea and his fair share of the scones.  
  
***  
Mrs Hudson wakes up with a start and stares incredulously at the ceiling. Then she looks to her alarm clock.  
  
Then she puts her pillow over her head.  
  
"Oh boys," she groans into it, "I'm happy for you and all, but honestly, it's _four in the morning_..."  
  
Mercifully, things get a little quieter right after this - they don't _stop_ , the bedsprings tell that tale, but it's as though they suddenly remember that Sherlock's bedroom is right over hers, and try to have a little consideration about the - the _shouting_. Enough that she can get back to sleep.  
  
***  
"I told you we'd wake her," John says. His voice is a low lovely growl and his hand is over Sherlock's mouth.  
  
 ** _Knew we would. Don't stop._**  
  
John thrusts once, hard, and Sherlock groans, muffled by his hand.  
  
 _Starting to think you get off on teasing that old lady._  
  
 ** _So much talking and so little fucking_ ,** and this is rewarded with exactly the opposite for several strenuous minutes.  
  
This bed is much bigger. Despite the noise problem, this room is definitely preferable. Will it be easier to soundproof this room, or to get John to agree to moving all the other furniture out of the upstairs bedroom so as to make room for a bed of reasonable size?  
  
John is close to coming but he holds back, stops himself, and this is good, Sherlock is not in a hurry, not now, because it is incredibly good and is to be savoured, and because once they conclude this particular activity they are likely to sleep for many hours.  
  
 ** _Maybe a change of position._**  
  
 _No... I like to see your face._  
  
 ** _Not mutually exclusive._**  
  
To illustrate, he pushes John off (John flinches at pulling out unexpectedly) and onto his back and then mounts him (and John gasps at thrusting in unexpectedly).  
  
"All right?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
John is still somewhat boggled at Sherlock's easy acceptance of this activity. It is even more taboo (and thus even more desirable, in the long run) than fellation in John's mind, yet it is also something he has done before (with the boring teacher, imagine that) and thus feels at least some familiarity with the act.  
  
Of course, this was not a concept Sherlock accepted as instantly as all that. He really did do a lot of research. He had no intention of suggesting everything he saw on the internet. Lots of things are inapplicable of course, and others are frankly bewildering, and he knows John better than to suggest many of the rest of them.  
  
But this is something John does want to do. It had been a lucky guess, but as it turns out, it is one of the things John has thought about and as soon as it was mentioned it was achingly obvious.  
  
Once they'd had some tea and argued over the last scone John followed him in here willingly enough, though he did look a trifle panicky at the sight of the bottle of lubricant. ("Where'd you get _that_?" - as though it were polonium. "Tesco." Where else?)  
  
This has turned out to be one of those situations where Sherlock takes charge until John is ready to take over and that's exactly how it worked and now he is here, on top of John, John inside him, looking up at him with big dark excited eyes. Their thoughts intertwine and surge and ebb and flow the way their bodies do. He can feel John's body, penetrating his, glorying in it, and he can feel John feeling his body, being penetrated, and glorying in that. Thrusting. Fast, then slow, with wondering caresses, then fast again, fast as an urgent chase.  
  
It really is splendid. It ought to go on for hours and hours and oh, they've woken Mrs Hudson back up again.  
  
Sherlock leans down on top of John and seeks out his mouth with his own, another futile effort to stay quiet when the truth is it just is not possible. Each of them is feeling the pleasure of two people and it cannot be contained. Not even with the best of intentions, and Sherlock doesn't claim to have those.  
  
"So much thinking and so little _riding my cock_ ," growls John, and Sherlock gasps with laughter to hear John say that out loud, that's brilliant, that's better than blasphemy.  
  
He'd love to make some clever remark about how it's like changing position but still seeing the face, not mutually exclusive, but suddenly it seems much less clever and miles less important. He is on top of John and John is absolutely undeniably his, no one else's, and John is thinking much the same about Sherlock only in a slightly different and distinctly old fashioned way, but this is not a problem.  
  
 _Yes. Yes. Ride me. Oh God Sherlock. So good. So fucking good._  
  
He has sat back again, losing the kiss and losing all restraint on his voice, head tipped back and incoherent cries echoing in the room;  
  
John's eyes are tightly shut and his fingers are bruising Sherlock's hips as he strains up against and into him;  
  
He is the one lying on the bed _thrusting_ up into tightness and pulsing heat;  
  
He is the one sitting astride, **_welcoming_ ** the hot hard thrusts inside him;  
  
Flickering, faster than eyes could blink if they were open, one and then the other, flickering;  
  
He is **_Sherlock_** ;  
  
he is _John_ ;  
  
He is this one, he is that one. One and one. One.


	10. Chapter 10

"Oh thank God," Emma says to the ceiling after several blissful minutes of true silence above.  
  
Of course she can't get back to sleep now. Being awakened once was bad enough, but twice in a row - and the sounds - Well. She had rather gotten the idea that John was the unexpectedly noisy one, but that had just been something depending on the situation, which is understandable if you stop to think about it.  
  
She probably _shouldn't_ stop to think about it but she just likes to. Where's the harm? And - goodness. From the sounds of things...  perhaps some kind of sound proofing might be called for. They might have had the decency to use John's room and spare a nice old lady all that amorous noise, but... the bed was a lot smaller up there, wasn't it. And two grown men and all, they had to need some room even when they were just sleeping. Which they are _finally_ doing now, from the sound of it - the absence of sound of it.  
  
Well, they _ought_ to be tired by now, anyway!  
  
Mrs Hudson thinks about getting up and letting the telly lull her back to sleep but it turns out she doesn't need to. She thinks of Christmas coming on, and the presents she is still deciding on; the special treats to be made, especially the potent rum balls everyone pretends to complain are too strong; she thinks of the new tenant and wonders what sort of interesting stories she might have to tell at the kitchen table if properly coaxed, and she thinks pleasurably of how she will complain to Mrs Turner about her boys keeping her up all hours of the night with their noisy sex.  
  
***

  
In the week that followed, they did the flowers together two more times. (Sherlock called it 'the preparation' and John called it 'the flowers' and it didn't matter which thing they called it, mentioning it caused both of them to get a little excited just remembering what they did and thinking about what they might do next time.)  
  
Sherlock would have gladly taken it every night, but John made them take at least a night off in between. If for no other reason, it was disruptive of sleep. Sherlock could have argued, but for whatever reason he chose not to.  
  
They slept together now at night. In the downstairs bed. John's dressing gown found a place in the bedroom, and then some of his clothes.  
  
It was good, actually. And if it made John self conscious - and it _did_ \- then it was a completely different kind of self consciousness than he had had before. This was almost enjoyable. In fact sometimes it really was.  
  
It turned out it was not so bad to be teased about sex all the time when one was having sex. All. The. Time.  
  
Even Sherlock laughed at him about it, but Sherlock could laugh all the way to the bedroom.  
  
It was nice not to hold back... at all. It was nice not to have to be... Gentle? No, sometimes he still was. It was nice not to have to be a _gentleman_. All the whole long dance of wondering and longing and not being sure was over and there were new ways now of longing and they were _fun_.  
  
It was nice to know exactly what he was doing, to feel it, and when they weren't doing the flowers, to read it in Sherlock's face and from his body the way any lovers did.  It was nice, it was better than nice. It was everything.  
  
When he ran into Sarah again at the shop it was very different from the last time. "Oh! John," she said, startled, and looked even more startled when he smiled at her.  
  
"Sorry about the last time," he further disarmed her by saying. "Things were a little..." He shrugged.  
  
"But things are better now?"  
  
"Oh yes."  
  
She seemed so wrong footed. She blinked at him as though he had only just come into focus. But she smiled.  
  
He saw Jeanette once, too, in a book shop, when he was looking for something for Christmas for Harry. She was too embarrassed to talk to him, but he felt her watching him surreptitiously the whole time she was there. And not in an angry way.  
  
"Suddenly I am attractive to girls," he said when he got home.  
  
"What are you going to do about it?" said Sherlock, not looking up from the microscope.  
  
"Well, _enjoy_ it, for a start." Out of the corner of his eye John could see a flash of colour as Sherlock glanced aside from the viewpiece at him. And a flash of teeth in a smile. Sherlock did not need telepathy or even clever deductions to know who was number one. Enjoying the notice of girls at this point was like pulling rank at Baskerville, a fleeting, occasional sort of pleasure. It wasn't a problem. Sherlock even seemed to enjoy when John did it.  
  
It _wasn't_ like Sherlock's _absurd_ jealousy of Grace Kelly, which it turned out was the reason John hadn't been allowed to look at her for more than a minute. Mid movie snogging had always been the intent, but apparently John had liked the look of her in that red dress a little too obviously much.  
  
It didn't matter that it was a movie or even that she was long dead. Hitchcock festivals were out. She was only in two of the films, but they were the best two.  
  
"Almost December. Mrs H will want a Christmas party," said John, putting down the papers and putting the milk away.  
  
"She's never getting me in the antlers," Sherlock said to the microscope.  
  
"I support that. Molly's got a new boyfriend, so, try not to - "  
  
"Not to be be a beast."  
  
"Exactly, yeah."  
  
Sherlock sighed as he adjusted his focus. "It depends on the boyfriend. Whether she likes him enough that it's safe to be nice to her."  
  
Good point.  
  
"And assuming it isn't Moriarty or anything," John pointed out, but though it was meant as a joke it fell rather flat.  
  
He was dead but his name was still a cold thing, as though it served as his ghost now.  
  
"He really is dead. I'm very sure."  
  
"I was very sure about you," John said.  
  
"There was manoeuvering room with me. You couldn't see everything, you were delayed reaching me. He shot himself while holding my hand, John. He blew out the back of his skull. He is dead."  
  
"Okay. Right. I know. Sorry. Sorry I brought him up."  
  
"Yes."  
  
Sherlock did not tend to say reassuring things like 'It's alright', but 'Yes' was better than silence. Especially when he was looking through the microscope.  
  
"What are you looking at?"  
  
"Orchid pollen."  
  
John smiled. Just the word orchid was a thing of warmth in and of itself by now.  
  
***  
The new tenant of 221C Baker Street moves in this weekend. Mrs Hudson is nervous and excited not just because of the income for Christmas, but because she is a little anxious about expanding her little family, what if it's a bad idea, what if the new girl doesn't like the upstairs neighbours or, worse, what if she should develop a passion for one of them? What a shame that would be. Emma thought she had been very clear that they were together but perhaps she had better make extra sure.  
  
She keeps early hours, that's for sure. At least they're fast asleep above after another one of those strenuous nights. Emma has bought herself some ear plugs (they have them at Tesco) and has found them incredibly helpful. It felt odd at first to have something sticking in her ear, but the way voices, Sherlock's in particular, carry right through her ceiling, well. _Something_ had to be done.  
  
So she has had some sleep and can give the girl - what was her name, she wrote it down, Elly something? a genuine smile as she offers coffee. Allie, that's it, probably short for Allison.  
  
She shouldn't call Allie a girl really, she's not young, must be in her thirties, but she sort of dresses like a girl, layers of thrift shop things and too much unicorn jewelry, and she could _really_ do with a bit of makeup on. And her _hair_... But, as she shyly tells Emma, she's a computer sort of person and spends all of her time when she isn't working in a sort of fantasy place where she is a wizard. Hence, a single woman's willingness to live in a frankly musty basement. It is a good location, as Emma always tells anyone who might be interested. It just happens to be in the basement. It hardly ever floods. Allie assures her that the computers will be kept well above floor level.  
  
"Computers?" Plural?  
  
Oh yes, says Allie, for the work she does for a living, and then there is a river of technical talk all about it that Emma can't follow at all. But the wizard business sounds harmless enough. And isn't it nice nowadays that the girls can not only be good at computers, but even more, they can just be _wizards_ , not witches or sorceresses or... or wizardesses. She waits for a break in the computer talk to say this to her new tenant.  
  
"A van will be around at eight, I hope it's not too much noise too early for your tenants upstairs," Allie is saying, and Mrs Hudson rolls her eyes, "Oh, wake them up all you like, that's a decent hour, teach them what a decent hour is," and Allie laughs and says, "Oh, that bad?" and Emma says "I wouldn't say bad, but if you should hear human tom cats upstairs late at night, well, there _are_ human tom cats upstairs." _There, was that clear enough?_  
  
There is a pause.  
  
"I'm not quite sure I follow?" Her eyebrows are raised so high they show over the glasses.  
  
"I mean - well, I did tell you, didn't I, that they're a couple?"  
  
"Oh yes," says Allie, "you did, but that doesn't necessarily mean - you know. Sometimes people make assumptions."  
  
"I have had to buy _ear plugs_ ," Mrs Hudson says firmly.  
  
"Oh! I see," and to Emma's horror the woman looks a little shocked after all. She shouldn't have assumed, just because Allie is younger doesn't mean she isn't - conservative. Or religious, maybe.  
  
"Oh dear, maybe I shouldn't have said anything," and now she can see her happy Christmas dwindling away and isn't it a shame, live and let live is what Emma Hudson has always said. "They're very nice. They're like _family_ to me," hoping to warn off any nasty sort of talk about decent people falling in love when it's nobody else's business.  
  
"Oh!" Allie looks startled, "Oh, I didn't mean... oh I assure you it's okay, I'm not - it's not - it's not any problem. I just didn't understand what you meant before. And I was surprised."  
  
Too subtle, Emma thinks sadly. She had been afraid of that.  
  
But then there is a break in the conversation and she can get her remark about women wizards in before she forgets about it.  
  
***  
As soon as Sherlock wakes up, he knows there is someone downstairs with Mrs Hudson.  
  
And he knows who it is.  
  
What should he do about it?  
  
He looks over at John, who sleeps the sleep of the exhausted beside him. A well earned sleep, too. Last night was - transcendent. Exquisite. The best experiment ever. He could compose a song about it, perhaps he will. A few notes are already gathering around one another in his head. A song that feels like John. He won't tell John what the song is about and he'll see if John can guess. He'll see how long it takes.  
  
But there is a problem downstairs right now.  
  
He gets up carefully. John will probably sleep for hours if nothing disturbs him, but it wouldn't do for him to wake up now. He gets dressed - no time to shower now, which is unfortunate, but emergencies are emergencies.  
  
He could go upstairs for John's gun. It's one item that John has not moved down from his bedroom - not yet. But he's not sure he needs it, and he knows he doesn't really want it.  
  
After a second considering, he goes without it. He puts on his coat, though. Even if one is not armed, the possibility that one might be is still useful.  
  
Sherlock goes downstairs to 221A, descending into the smell of fresh coffee, and the air is such that the door to the street has been open this morning and he can hear Mrs Hudson saying, "oh there's one of them now," and then he is in the kitchen doorway. Sitting there at the table is an almost unrecognisable woman in a wallflower's costume of scarves and charms and chipped multicoloured nails and ridiculous horn rimmed glasses over top coloured contact lenses and two extra stone of weight and completely different hair. Almost unrecognisable.  
  
"Well now," says Irene Adler, smiling, letting her empty hands show above the table, signalling herself unarmed. "Hullo neighbour."  
  
Mrs Hudson starts to speak, but Sherlock cuts her off, never taking his eyes off the woman - The Woman - at the table.  
  
"Hello." His voice is neutral. "We didn't expect to see you again."  
  
"We...?" She raises her eyebrows, looks around as though for John. "If half of you still upstairs?"  
  
 ** _Yes_**.  
  
"Half of me thinks you're dead," Sherlock says levelly. "And will give the rest of me hell once he knows the truth."  
  
"Sorry about that."  
  
"Sherlock," Mrs Hudson says weakly, "have you and Allie met, then...?"  
  
"Yes. Why are you here, 'Allie'?" She cannot seriously wish to live in that squalid hole in the ground, she'd had a townhouse with Picasso nudes on the wall of her boudoir and Persian silk rugs on the floor.  
  
"I do need a place to live," she says. "I do have a business to run. I have to do things a little differently now, not so much face to face anymore you might say, but _some_ things never change. And I missed London so much, you've no idea. This is a _great_ location."  
  
Mrs Hudson looks pleased.  
  
"John will not want you here." John will be furious just knowing that she has been _near_ here. His jealousy of her had been clear even back then, and it was not likely to improve with another revelation of faked death - a sore enough subject.  
  
Also, she has been sitting here with Mrs Hudson, learning. Although he is certainly much more relaxed than he might have been, John will not like her taunting them. And she will do it just for fun.  
  
"But I'm already here," Irene says, and Sherlock knows now that something bad is in progress and that she cannot or will not stop it.  
  
"What is this _about_?" says Mrs Hudson sharply. Then, distracted by a sound outside, "Oh, that'll be the van with your things...?"  
  
Sherlock stares at Irene Adler for an agonised instant. _I helped you. I saved you. I should have let them cut off your head, I should have done it myself._  
  
Then he turns and bolts for the stairs.  
  
A nightmare of slowest motion.  
  
 ** _John_** , he is shouting inside, but he doesn't dare shout because if the men she has brought are not already in the flat then they are entering it right now. The arriving van will not have brought them, it will be there to take them away. **_JOHN_**.  
  
***  
John was awakened by Sherlock's voice.  
  
 ** _Yes_**.  
  
He opened his eyes. Sherlock was not there and... Something was wrong. Sherlock was worried. And angry.  
  
And how did John know that, in the light of day?  
  
Something was wrong.  
  
He rolled out of the bed, landed on his feet, listened. Silence in the flat but... a gathered, waiting kind of silence, a waiting for thunderstorm kind of tension. Where it was from he did not know. But it was a threat. Veiled, but a threat.  
  
John ran - barefoot, naked - up the stairs to his old room where his gun was still in the bedside drawer. He had it in his hand when he heard things begin to happen downstairs.  
  
And Sherlock shouting urgently in his head.  
  
And the sound of the splintering of wood. A door being kicked or shouldered in?  
  
And Mrs Hudson's voice raised in hysterical protest.  
  
And another voice, a woman's voice, shouting instructions, and John knew that voice. Another fucking ghost.  
  
A man came pounding up the stairs, strange man, armed and carrying, _threat_. John shot him. Aimed down the stairs as another one came running and found out what the first man found out: John was armed. And a terribly good shot.  
  
John had to step over both men as he came down the stairs, someone else was coming and he was listening over his pounding heart and trying to quiet his breathing but the man now in his sights was Sherlock and John lowered the gun, eyes wide.  
  
Their eyes met and locked. _Woman. - **Yes, behind me.**_  
  
They didn't have to ask each other if they were all right. They could see and feel that they were all right. But there was still the Woman.  
  
She had a gun too. He knew it before he saw her step out from behind Sherlock.  
  
The gun in John's hand came up as though by itself at the sight of her. She smiled broadly.  
  
"Some remarks just make themselves, don't they?" she murmured. She looked so different, but she sounded just the same. "It's a pleasure to see you again, Doctor Watson."  
  
"The pleasure's all yours," growled John. She made a merry face, as though they were doing comedy improvisation and she liked his style.  
  
"That's going a bit far, but it is still interesting to see you. Mrs Hudson told me the two of you have become quite the public nuisance lately, is that true?"  
  
"Yes," said Sherlock, sparing John any need to answer or ignore the question.  
  
She smiled at John, but it wasn't the sarcastic or triumphant sort of smile he would have expected. It was a sad smile.  
  
"There's a third man," said Sherlock calmly. "With a hostage."  
  
In the van.  
  
"Kate," said Irene Adler, and John remembered her now, the Woman's woman, the pretty girl who had answered her door and who was roughed up by the CIA men.  
  
"She is to you as John is to me." Sherlock's eyes were on John's as he spoke to her.  
  
"Yes," she said.  
  
"And who is it who has her," asked John, "is this some - time bomb of Moriarty's, if Sherlock survived after all?"  
  
"Yes," she said. "Puppets of his. I work for them now. They'll kill her."  
  
Sherlock said, "You should have asked me for help."  
  
"I AM ASKING," she shouted. John's face flinched, but his hand remained rock steady.  
  
"Then I'll need that," and Sherlock reached for her gun.  
  
John was surprised when she gave it up, and even more surprised when Sherlock shot her.  
  
Unlike John, Sherlock didn't shoot to kill. Irene lay bleeding on the floor in the hall, not far from where they concluded their date that day.  
  
Sherlock shoved his gun hand into his coat pocket and ran down the stairs.  
  
"Sherlock!" John was caught in an agony of indecision, no time to get clothes, a naked man wielding a gun on the street - but he actually started down anyway because it was Sherlock and there was danger and adrenaline.  
  
But it was over before he got outside. The third man, hearing over a wire on Irene that she had been shot, had turned away from the bound woman on the floor of the van and started to open the door and then Sherlock had finished opening it and head butted his way inside to free the hostage.  
  
And John, halfway down the stairs, gun in his hand, stark naked, met the eyes of Mrs Hudson as she peered fearfully out of her door.  
  
"Can't you please go put something on?" she said in a stage whisper. "Honestly."  
  
***  
  
The Christmas party that year was both a success and a disaster.  
  
A disaster, in that Mrs Hudson did not after all have the income she had counted on from a tenant downstairs and grumbled about it, often. And in that Molly's new beau was horrible and tried to pick a fight with Sherlock and ended up being shown downstairs by Lestrade and John.  
  
A success, in that Sherlock played "Hello I Must Be Going" on the violin while they did so.  
  
A disaster, in that Mrs Hudson ate at least two too many of her highly oversaturated rum balls and began to complain that she put up with an awful lot of naked shootings and sex noise and terrible smells and all she asked for Christmas was that Sherlock just put the sodding antlers on for one fucking song.  
  
A success, in that when John tried to make peace and soothe the savagely drunk landlady by offering to wear the antlers, Sherlock marched across the room, snatched them away from John, slammed them onto his own head, and played "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" as fast as his fingers could play it.  
  
A failure, in that mistletoe was bought but nobody remembered to put it up.  
  
A success, in that the mistletoe was really not needed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was written for National Novel Writing Month in 2012.
> 
> I thought I picked the name "Emma" out of the air for Mrs Hudson, but it turns out I've seen Kryptaria use it. It's a good name for a good landlady.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to TheSoupDragon for catching a couple of ground-level errors ("sidewalk" and "curb") and kindly telling me. ♥

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